


A Righteous Man

by alchimie



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Hell, Hellhounds, M/M, Mentions Jess/Sam, Past Character Death, Season 4 AU, Season/Series 04, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-02
Updated: 2016-12-20
Packaged: 2018-07-19 17:13:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 50,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7370497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alchimie/pseuds/alchimie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivereth him out of them all."<br/>—Psalm 34:19</p><p>To redeem himself in the eyes of his brethren, Castiel is assigned by the archangel Michael to retrieve a soul from Hell: a young hunter by the name of Sam Winchester. A simple enough task in theory, but the pits of Hell are not ready to free the righteous man of the prophecies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Pit

**Author's Note:**

> I'm really excited to have written a full chapter-ed work after all this time, especially on my newer account. This piece if completed, but I'm just posting each part as it's edited. I hope you guys enjoy.
> 
> This work is full of several characters that do not belong to me, as well as overarching themes and storylines ripped from the show. 
> 
> WARNING: This chapter contains descriptions of violence, including torture involving insects.

“ _Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivereth him out of them all._ ”  
— **Psalm 34:19**  


From the outside, the two-story house looked mundane and unimpressive. The simple dwelling stood in the middle of a nearly desolate rural community, a good five miles from the closest neighbor and a good hundred miles from any true civilization. The only way to approach the home was through one thin, winding dirt road. Well, for a human, that is. On the outside, it appeared to be beaten down and covered in nothing but a few cheap coats of fraying white paint, but any angel could see that it held a thousand glowing blue sigils of protection under the clever camouflage.

The farm once was the quaint residence of a family of four: two stout, immigrant parents with bright smiles and two starry-eyed daughters with even brighter smiles. They had moved out near the dawn of the 20th century when a smooth talking city man offered them three times what the land was worth, claiming to be a “country boy at heart” that just wanted a “piece of the simple life back”. The family packed their bags, trading the patch of Indiana farm for a warm home just outside of Chicago where the father could finally get the education he desired and the daughters could meet some fine gentleman that would give them a better life than that of farmwives. The family for the rest of their lives were convinced that the man must have been some sort of angel sent to bless them. All four of them would live the rest of their lives never knowing the truth that they were half right. The house, like thousands of other places around the world, was acquired by the army of God as an outpost where Selaphiel was currently stationed after Ezekiel, the mysterious charmer, relocated to a suburb a couple miles south of Quebec City. Today, Selaphiel surrendered her outpost temporarily to the higher-ranking angel, as was the protocol for any important meeting such as this one.

She stood at the entrance now with two other soldiers by her side to greet the guest as he walked up to the old door, painted white along with the rest of the house. At the foot of the entryway was a faded, chestnut welcome mat with the words “God bless this house” written in green cursive letters. Selaphiel was always known through the ranks for her strange sense of humor.

No words were exchanged as the guest stepped past the trio and into the house, even as the three other angels followed their brother through the foyer and into the kitchen. Even before reaching the room, they could all smell the fresh, warm aroma of bread baking in the vintage oven and hear the gentle hiss of the cast iron kettle on the stove above it. This was all a part of the façade, as none of them would ever require sustenance or even enjoy it. Selaphiel, along with being humorous, also fancied playing the part of the sweet, old farm lady to the point where the whole house was decorated with little trinkets she acquired from the other humans in her small town.

“Antiques, all the humans out here are mad about them. Anything old is new to them if it’s in the right shop,” she would insist whenever her brethren asked questions about the peculiar, decrepit objects littered around the shelves and on the floor. Secretly, the only reason for her collection was that she adored all the wonderfully beautiful things humans created, and she adored humans. For this, many angels often looked down upon her. While it was blasphemous to speak ill of God’s favorite creation, all the angels saw humankind as less furry beasts which they had to tend to. Becoming invested in them was beneath them. Nonetheless, the judgement of her peers never stopped her from going to the farmer’s market every Saturday morning and inviting her far-off neighbors for supper after church every Sunday evening. Though she’d never admit it to her holy siblings, Selaphiel was even a member of a book club in the town.

Once the group reached the kitchen, they found another angel sitting at a wooden table painted a bright cherry red, an untouched cup of tea sitting before him with the face of a cartoon rabbit painted on its side. The rabbit grinned at the uneasy newcomer, while the angel behind it wore no expression on his vessel’s smooth face. The angel looked all business: he was dressed to the nines in a midnight black suit that didn’t match the homely and relaxed aesthetic of the house around him. 

Selaphiel ushered the guest toward the table, pulling out a chair before speaking. “Sir, here he is. Castiel.” Selaphiel and the others took a step back while their guest, Castiel, sat down at the table across from the archangel. 

Castiel had only stood in front of Michael once before thousands of years ago when man was still young, the beauty of the archangel feeling as if it would blind him just as looking upon the Father would. It would be impossible to ignore the feeling to bow down to the powerful figure, and sure enough, Castiel was old enough to know that this drive was one of the greatest sources of Michael’s power. His righteousness and holiness overwhelmed even the most devoted soldiers of God. Even so, only few angels were gifted with the chance to see the archangel who had taken up God’s role since he had disappeared not long after the birth of Adam and the fall of his favorite son. Looking over Michael’s perfect face beneath the vessel and feeling his bright energy filling the air, Castiel remained frozen with awe until the archangel finally spoke up, breaking the silence that had lingered since he first sat down at the table, awaiting the words of his leader.

“Castiel,” Michael spoke in a tone that sounded soft but felt thunderous on his borrowed bones, “do you know why you have been called here today?”

“No, sir,” answered the angel cautiously, feeling as if he sounded too meek with his vessel’s scratchy voice. He recoiled slightly after speaking, thinking that somehow he already let the archangel down. Surely, if he was here, he should know. He should already be ready to serve, should already have done what was needed by now. Was he here to be punished for not doing his job? Was Michael here to finally smite him for his shame?

A small smile danced upon Michael’s lips for a moment. “You’re overwhelmed, but do not worry. I would not call upon you unless I trusted you for this job,” he said. “You have served Heaven well these past centuries, brother, and you have made a good name for yourself since the last time I called upon you.”

Castiel held his composure, but his mind wandered off for a second, remembering his failure so long ago.

“Brother, do not fret about the past any longer.” The archangel slowly rose from his chair, abandoning the cold cup of tea and ambling over toward Castiel. “The job I offer you now—this is your chance at redemption. I have faith in you, Castiel. I believe you can succeed, and I want you to succeed.” Michael paused, that same fleeting smile passing by his lips as he rested a hand on the lower angel’s shoulder. 

“What is the mission?”

All the other angels in the room stared down Castiel after he spoke up, including Michael before he chuckled and continued his circle around the table. 

“You always were one to want to get down to business. You know, I respect that in you. After all, we don’t need this meeting to be any longer than necessary.”

Castiel went stiff, watching Michael take his seat once more, grabbing the mug as if he were going to drink it. Instead, he just stared at the bitter black tea inside.

“Last year, there was a man—hardly a man, more of a boy—who made a deal with a crossroad’s demon after his brother died. The deal only gave him one year before his time was up and his soul was reaped by the Hellhounds. Now, usually it is not our jurisdiction to interfere with the matters of Hell. They have their business to deal with, and we have ours, and that very balance is necessary for the world to continue on, but this boy is too important to Heaven. His deal was not a mere coincidence or another tragic human being tempted by the crossroads. This boy is part of the prophecies regarding Lucifer. Lilith, his first demon, is using this boy to break the first of the 66 Seals.”

“He is the righteous man?” Castiel, like all the angels, was familiar with this prophecy. The first seal to open up Lucifer’s prison was a human soul deemed too righteous for Hell giving in to temptation and torturing another soul.

Michael nodded. “It’s critical that we retrieve him from Hell before he succumbs to the demons. It’s the only way to ensure that Lucifer remains in his cage, and that we prevent the Apocalypse from happening before its time. I cannot retrieve the boy, the walls of Hell’s gate are too small for me to enter. It must be a lower angel that executes the plan. We have already sent two others down to retrieve the boy, but they disappeared during the descent before they even reached him. It’s a very dangerous mission, Castiel, but I believe you can handle it.”

“Break into Hell?” Memories flooded Castiel’s mind of the last time he attempted to do such a thing, but surely Michael could not believe that it would go any better this time. He was not worthy nor capable of such a mission. “You are trusting me with this task?”

“It’s your chance at a clean slate, brother. Do you accept?”

Castiel looked down at the hands of his vessel. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see a clock on the wall in the shape of a smiling black cat with its tails wagging each second that passed by. He wondered to himself why every object in that house seemed to smile at him. 

“Yes, I do.”

*

Entering Hell was always the easiest part of any trip down to the underworld. Castiel learned early on why God designed it that way when He needed a home for Lucifer’s cage and the demon abominations he created. Hell would be easy for a creature to enter—both metaphorically and literally. The angel recalled his first journey, the way time seemed to fly by as he descended into the pits of Hell where the tortured souls dwell. A trek that should have taken years in Hell’s time passed by in mere minutes before he had fallen flat onto the dried and decaying core. He could still smell the detestable reeking sulphur biting at his old vessel’s nose. The endless chorus of screams ringing throughout his ears for years to come, one presence standing out from the infinite crowd of human souls. Souls tied up to contraptions that would dig into their pseudo-flesh, rip their limps apart, tear out their organs one by one, and put them back together again just to repeat the process. Demons wearing the faces of lovers, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, priests, teachers, and anyone a person had ever held near as they carved away at the souls until they, too, were twisted and tainted enough to turn demonic and torture the newcomers. 

Perhaps Castiel had thought too highly of the mission when Michael offered it to him. As he stood painting the sigils on the chosen mausoleum door, he felt the pangs of doubt, the kind that could be deadly to an angel. Michael wouldn’t offer a mission to him like this unless he were sincere about reviving Castiel’s reputation. To think otherwise would be heresy. He should feel _blessed_ to be offered such a mission, for redemption was the hardest thing for an angel to come by. Lucifer had been locked away for his sins, Gadreel trapped in Heaven’s jails, and countless others merely smited on the spot for failure. Castiel was blessed that Michael favored him enough to give him this opportunity.

Once the last symbol painted in pig’s blood was complete, the door faded away, leaving a smoking black hole. The angel swiftly ran in through the portal before closing it off with an Enochian chant to ensure it was sealed shut before any demons could sneak through out into the mortal world. No mistakes would be mad this time, not even little ones. 

Castiel slowed down once he stood in the satanic realm, taking careful steps as he approached the cliffs of Hell that would lead him into the pit. Looking back towards the gate, the threshold that had just been ten feet back not long ago now appeared fifty yards behind him. No matter how gradual his pace, the pit acted like a magnet, constantly pulling all inhabitants closer and closer to its heart. 

He sauntered to the very edge of the cliff, looking down into the fall he had taken long ago. From up here, it appeared to go on for miles, no end in sight passed the murky smoke clouds and the stench of burning and rotting flesh. 

How would he even find this boy in time? What if the boy already gave in to temptation and broke the first seal? How were they so sure that the “righteous man” of the prophecies was this Sam Winchester, some meager human who thought himself a demon-hunter?

Castiel could not listen to this doubt. These questions would consume him if he let them. He had an important mission to complete—possibly one of the most important missions any of his brethren had ever taken up. The beginning of the Apocalypse all depended on his success here today.

Taking a low breath, he took the leap that would bring him speeding down towards the rocky center. Beastly imps flew around him in circles, looking like disfigured and deformed birds. They emitted sounds that resembled human cackles while trying to peck and claw at the angel. Castiel prayed to a God that couldn’t hear him for his wings to work, to be able to fly back out and beg Michael for another way than this, but this descent was a one way ticket he couldn’t abandon. Not much time passed before the winged imps abandoned him to torture another creature, and judging by the sulfuric odors that were growing more pungent by the second he sensed that the destination grew closer. 

He could start to see the bottom now, see the souls on their racks with the predatory demons mutilating their bodies. His mind wandered back to the conversation with Michael not long ago in that Indiana farmhouse. 

_We have already sent two others down to retrieve the boy,_ he had said. _But they disappeared during the descent before they could even reach him._

The little figures on the ground grew larger and sharper. The angel could make out their faces and features now, and all of them had stopped to look up at him—the angelic comet racing down to the surface.

Michael had not chosen Castiel because he wanted to give him a shot at redemption.

Michael had chosen Castiel because it was a suicide mission.

*

_Your name is Sam._

_You are a hunter._

_You save people._

_You will get out of here._

Sam stared up at the ceiling of the room, eyes scanning over the lines on the walls he memorized not long after he first entered it. Whenever it was that he had entered the room—that portion of his memory was murky and difficult to navigate without getting a headache. He knew he didn’t have much time more before she returned to start off the new day. Long ago he would cringe at the thought of another day, beg for death’s forgiving release, but now he accepted the routine. She would come to him, find a million painful and humiliating ways to tear him apart, offer him freedom if he complies with her demands, and then leave without achieving anything. Sam didn’t even remember anymore what her demands were, that being something else he lost long ago. All he knew was he couldn’t give in to her. He had to wait and just believe that something was coming, no matter how futile that hope proved to be after each day, each month, and each year that nothing happened.

_Your name is Sam._

_You are a hunter._

_You save people._

_You will get out of here._

He recited each line slowly in his head, the words a mantra he used to get through each day. He once said them out loud, but Meg would use the words to mock him and cut out his tongue whenever she heard him whispering to himself. Scared that the negative association would make him lose faith, he resigned to repeating them instead in his head, somewhere she couldn’t taint them or take them away. While it seemed unlikely, he believed if he said them enough to himself perhaps he could get through this, find a way out somehow. In a way, those four lines were like a prayer, even if Sam never really knew who exactly he was praying to.

The list had been a lot longer years ago, but Sam had forgotten most of the more intricate details of his life before Meg and her steel room inside of the pit. These four statements were all the things he really knew anymore, and he would repeat them to himself every day while he went through the torture in attempts to stay grounded to something. Sometimes while Meg found new and innovative ways to carve out his insides, those four statements were enough to distract him, bring him back to how he imagined life before her.

Occasionally, Sam witnessed a short flash of a memory. There were a couple images of his old life that couldn’t escape his brain, no matter how many times Meg “put it through the blender” as she liked to call it. A shiny black car. A green eyed man with freckles. A woman on fire. The first two were far more pleasant to think about than the last, but even some times he imagined that woman alive and smiling beautifully at him, sitting down at a place. . . a place. . . A café, that was the word. They would read academic books together and drink strangely flavored coffee. He forgot her name long ago, along with the green eyed man and another man he could imagine sitting in the shiny car. Long ago Meg would wear their faces like masks, taunt him with their flesh and their voices, but she had abandoned that a few years back when he lost a grip on who they were. Wearing faces he didn’t recognize wasn’t “fun” enough to appease Meg’s reoccurring boredom.

They weren’t real, anyway. How could anything else be real outside of Meg and the four walls of her room?

Sam squeezed his eyes shut at that thought. There had to be life outside of the room with Meg. Meg wasn’t everything. He was not just a play thing. He had to believe that he could escape.

_Your name is Sam._

_You were a hunter._

_No, you_ are _a hunter._

_You save people._

_You will get out of here._

“Rise and shine, Sammy!” Meg shouted while walking into the room, as if she had been gone from the room longer than a few minutes since “calling it a night”. Since she didn’t sleep, most nights she stepped out to give the impression of a break for rest. She never disappeared for long during what she claimed was nighttime, however, only leaving Sam for “business calls” during the days. One time he lucked out when she didn’t return for nearly two days while out on supposed business. Despite how tired he felt, Sam knew he would never be able to sleep during any of these absences. He had tried before, tried resting his eyes, but he never got the relief of drifting off into nothing for even a moment. He was permanently trapped here with Meg.

“I made you a proper breakfast. Would you like some?”

Sam didn’t even have the chance to respond before his mouth filled with slimy, gray maggots, their squirming bodies falling down his throat and starting to chomp down on his insides. He tried to cough them up, but no matter how many he spat out of his mouth onto the dirty ground, dozens more oozed down his throat until he was choking on the crawly insects. He could feel tiny teeth as sharp as razors gnawing at the lining of his stomach until they began to burst out from underneath the skin. He must have counted hundreds of the little gooey insects claw out of his fragile flesh before they all disappeared and he could breathe again. 

Now that his throat cleared, he was finally free to vomit onto the floor. He closed his eyes, dreading he would see more maggots crawling on the floor from his upheaval.

“Open those pretty eyes, Sam. You know I hate it when you close them,” she begged in a pouty tone, yanking him up by his hair. 

Sam opened his eyes only to spit into Meg’s face. 

Laughing, Meg wiped her face clean, her eyes shining coal black underneath her blonde fringe. “You never stop being fun, Sammy. I like that. So many self-righteous punks like you throw in the towel after just five years, at the very least turn all ‘Woe is me!’ out of nowhere and stop putting up a fight. All that pitiful crying makes me sick, you know. But not my Sam, you always keep on keeping on.” She pet over his long brown hair before grabbing hold of it tightly. “You actually make it a challenge to break you.” Dragging him up by his hair, she hurled him across the room, slamming him into the steel wall where she had conjured up a line of spikes. The spikes dug into the already broken flesh of his stomach as Sam coughed up coppery blood onto the wall.

Long ago he would cry out, scream for people he knew couldn’t hear him, pray to a God who wouldn’t listen, but now he took all the pain in silence. Any sound would only please Meg. She seemed to get off on that kind of shit.

The demon snapped her red-painted fingers, and Sam sat back on his “bed”—the hard slap of stone in the middle of the room. His stomach was smooth once again, as if he had never even been punctured and scratched. All he had to cover up his shame were a pair of black pants. Meg would say he was lucky she bothered to cloth him at all, though she would also say that the pants were part of the fun. Ripping them to shreds was part of the anticipation of castration. Sam really hoped it wasn’t a day for that kind of fun again. 

_Your name is Sam._

Meg placed her small, freezing hands on the sides of Sam’s face. Her nails scrapped at the surface harshly, although not deep enough or hard enough to break the skin.

_You are a hunter._

Leaning down, she pressed a gentle kiss to his forehead, her lips lingering over the skin for a couple of too-long seconds, making him feel queasy. Sam hated this more than anything else, the fake acts of love. Her trying to contrast the torture with gentle touches or kisses to his head, cheeks, sometimes even his lips. He would eat a thousand maggots every single morning if it meant that she never laid those disgusting lips upon him ever again. 

_You save people._

With careful hands, she raised his head up off of the slab, stroking her sharp, crimson nails through his long locks for nearly a minute as she hummed a simple melody. Beaming down at her defenseless pet, she gripped hard on the sides of his soft face and bashed his head into the unforgiving stone bed. The room filled with the sound of his skull cracking, and he could smell the sticky blood pooling around his head like a ruby halo. In the distance, he swore he heard shouting, but he tuned it out to the best of his ability along with the pain.

_You will get out of here._

_You will get out of here._

_You will get out of here._

“You got that constipated look of concentration on your face again. Still trying to convince yourself you’ll be saved?” Meg asked with a tone of amusement as she took a stroll over toward the wall where all her “tools” hung. Her little fingers brushed over each item that hung from her wall one by one, her touch gentle and caring as if she were petting a litter of newborn kittens. “What are we feeling today, Sam darling? It’s been a while since I brought Mr. Hammer out to play, but you know how I prefer to slice rather than smash. I’ve got a pretty new blade that’s just dying to make a pretty picture out of your chest. I’m getting good at calligraphy, maybe this could help me practice.” Meg reached out a slim white hand to grab an eight-inch butcher knife, but before she could remove it from the wall there was a knock at the door.

Sam looked up, surprised. There hadn’t been a visitor in at least twenty years, if not more. Meg’s ego was too large for her to ever share her pet with anyone else, no matter how often she threatened to toss him to the Hellhounds or bring in several demons to all tear together. The last time they’d been interrupted by a lower demon, Meg nearly tore their head off for intruding. 

A demon resembling a woman with long dark chocolate hair rushed into the room. Her wide black eyes looked frightened, a look Sam had never seen on any of them before. “Meg, we have to get Winchester out of here. Now.”

For the first time in all that he could remember, Meg seemed honestly scared. “What are you doing here? What’s going on?”

“They’ve sent another angel. We can’t take this one down, we’re going to have to hide him.”

An angel? Sam started to stand up before he was struck down onto the stone bed by Meg’s power. He tried to squirm around but was rendered immobile by the demonic force. The man felt sure that he misheard the other demon woman because there were no such thing as angels. All there were here were demons and the poor sons of bitches they tortured. And hunters—the thing he once was before this.

Conjuring up a leash and collar around the man’s throat, Meg yanked Sam toward her feet. “Come on, pup, it’s time to go for a walk.” Before he could do anything to control it, Sam was being forced to stand up and move in pace with his demon master.

Could he have heard right? An angel? An angel looking for him?

Meg dragged Sam with her out of the room, despite the complete look of shock on his face once he crossed through the door. Sam had never seen what was outside of Meg’s room. A dry wasteland with a scarlet sky lay before him, filled with millions of demons and their pets, all scrambling in random directions to escape whatever the two demon women feared. Sam tried to cover up his ears when a screeching, high-pitched siren shook through the land. In the distance, a blue light glowed. 

“Sam, hurry your ass up or I will cut you into fifty pieces and carry you in a jar full of acid,” Meg growled over the siren sound. Sam couldn’t help but listen to her as his feet were compelled by her power to keep moving forward off toward a cloud of black smoke in the distance. He turned his head toward the globe of blue light in the distance that only grew brighter and larger. Demons fell before it as they were consumed by what could only be described as holy fire. Despite the destruction, the light was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. 

_Sam Winchester_. A voice unlike any he’d ever heard before spoke. Mesmerized by the voice and the glow, the man hardly noticed that Meg’s power over him was dwindling as he slowed down. Her screams of rage felt muted, even her nails slicing into his back and her pulling at his arms until it nearly ripped from his socket couldn’t hurt him. He knew that she continued to strike at him, but he felt nothing but a gentle warmth as the blue approached him. Every step the light took towards Sam was like cool water poured over a burn. 

Both of the demon women had their hands on him now, and they dragged Sam out of his peaceful state by pulling him into the black cloud finally. The light disappeared completely as Sam could see nothing. 

“How long will this hold?” Meg demanded.

“Hopefully long enough for someone to step in,” said the other woman. 

“What are we supposed to do if he breaks through?”

“Pray.”

Meg snorted, but it didn’t sound like genuine amusement. 

In the darkness, Sam felt irate hands push him down onto the ground, something long and sharp being conjured up just to dig into his back. For the first time in decades, knowing finally someone would hear him, Sam began to scream at the top of his lungs. The blade only dug in deeper to his flesh as Meg cursed and pleaded at him, begged him for something he didn’t understand. He repeated his four statements over and over again, trying to dissociate just a little longer. 

The last thing he saw was blue before he blacked out for the first time.

*

While it felt like ages that Sam was unconscious, only a few moments had passed before he blinked awake slowly. A warm hand stroked over his back, sealing up the bloody mess that Meg left behind in her last fits of rage. The healing touch wasn’t like when Meg would “reset” him to start anew, it truly felt like whatever force was at play was putting him back together, undoing decades of torment on the vulnerable flesh.

“You’re awake,” the voice Sam heard before spoke.

He got up sluggishly, turning around so that he could look up at his savior. Instead of a glowing orb of light like the one before, what he found was a man in a trench coat and a tie with fierce blue eyes staring down at him. A severe, stiff expression sat upon his face, eyebrows looking permanently furrowed above the icy eyes, heavy lines dented into his forehead. Despite appearing like a beacon of energy not long ago, now he didn’t look very tall at all, probably even a lot smaller than Sam was. Larger than Meg, yes, but with how she never came close to towering over Sam when he stood up, he always felt it safe to assume he might be on the tall side.

“You must be very confused,” he continued. “You have been down here a long time, at least for a human soul. Time moves very slowly down here, and the atmosphere warps the mind. I don’t think you remember much of who you are at this point, do you?”

Sam shook his head slightly, still amazed at how shockingly plain this thing looked. It looked more like an accountant than a Godly ball of cosmic energy, but maybe he wasn’t one to judge. After all, he couldn’t remember what he looked like at all, no matter how hard he focused. For all he knows, he could look even more like a stressed out accountant on a mission above his pay grade.

“I know you are still coming to terms with this, but we do need to move fast. I used up most of my allotted power getting to you. Being this far off from Heaven blocks off my energy source, making my power limited. I won’t be able to fend off many more demons. I can explain myself later, but for now we need to evacuate the pit,” the man—or thing in the trench coat said in his gravely, flat voice. Grabbing Sam’s wrists, he lifted up the tall boy with ease, as if he weighed as much as a feather. “Close your eyes, this might make you a bit nauseous.” 

Still too stunned to comprehend much, Sam missed the cue to close his eyes as the thing in the trench coat put two fingers to his forehead. All the surroundings of the world outside Meg’s room began to swirl into a mix of reds, blacks, and browns before his eyes. The rough ground faded out from underneath him, and he began to float in the mix of burnt colors. It was like being carried by the gentlest tornado. The dancing colors continued on for what seemed to the man to be an hour before he slammed down onto the earth, far less gently than when the twister began. Instead of being in the middle of the pit, they now sat just outside a dark cavern. Sam suspected that they were still in the pit somewhere, just in a very dark corner he’d never seen before. Everything look just a few shades darker beside the mouth of the cave, like they were standing in the shade of a large oak tree. 

Just as predicted, a wave of nausea ran over Sam, causing him to dry heave onto the ground beside the cave before flopping down, staring up at the murky, black sky. At least that was mostly one color and very stationary, calming down his senses gradually.

The savior accountant, completely unaffected by the soul’s reaction, lifted him up once again with the same ease as before, guiding him into the dark cavern where he could see nothing. After being escorted a few yards in, the hands guiding him disappeared and Sam grew anxious without something to hold on to in the unlit cavern.

“What’s going on?” Sam asked in a panicked voice. He reached around frantically for the other in the empty blackness, only ending up running into one of the walls. The sticky, slimy feeling from the cavern walls caused the man to recoil hastily. As he tried to keep feeling around for something less repulsive to hold on to, something hairy and fast zipped past his feet, nearly causing him to topple over.

“It’s all right. I need to open up a gate to the second layer. We will be safer there—somewhat. This may hurt, but I need your blood so that you can get through the portal I’m making or else you’ll be trapped here without me.”

Before he could question what was going to hurt, something grabbed hard onto his wrist and sliced into his tender skin. It stung, but he silenced his instinct to cry out just by force of habit. After all, a cut on the hand was far from being the worst thing he had been through today, especially when he recalled his “breakfast”.

“Who are you? Where are you taking me?”

“We don’t have much time for explanation. I sense that they’re going to know where we are soon. My name is Castiel, I am an angel of the Lord—“

“An _angel_?”

“I don’t have time for questions. I am an angel of the Lord sent to retrieve you. Here, I’m going to grab your hands now. Hold on to me tightly.”

The strong, rough hand reached for Sam’s wounded one, pulling him into the cave’s wall. Sam braced himself for impact, expecting to slam into the slimy rocky, but the pair slipped through the wall with ease, nothing there but thin air.


	2. Burn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "There were no angels. There was no Heaven. There wasn’t even an Earth. This was all there could ever be. Fire."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, these characters don't belong to me.
> 
> WARNING: This chapter also has descriptions of violent scenes, though not as much graphic torture as the first. It contains descriptions of animal attacks and being burned alive. Use discretion if either of those subjects are triggering.
> 
> Reposted this chapter since there was an issue the first time.

 

  
_“The sky is red, I don't understand,_  
_Past midnight I still see the land._  
_People are saying the woman is damned,_  
_She makes you burn with a wave of her hand._  
_Warning came, no one cared._  
_Earth was shaking, we stood and stared._  
_When it came, no one was spared._  
_Still I hear ‘Burn!’”_  
— **“Burn” by Deep Purple**  


Before Sam saw it, he felt it. Every limb on his body burned up in the scorching blaze that took a hold of him like a giant hand grabbing him. When his vision finally came to, everything looked bright, angry orange and devil red. Sam wrestled with the inferno trapping him, but the flames held him in itself, a cage holding a wild animal. Opening his mouth to scream was futile; the fire crawled between his lips, cascaded down his throat, and consumed him from the inside as well as the outside. Not even the tears that began to pour down his face phased the blaze as his skin melted from his bones, starting at the very tips of his fingers and working up to his knuckles, then his palms, then his wrists. The skin on his toes melted as well, the tips of his feet turning to ash and causing the rest of his mutilated form to collapse in on itself. Blinded once again as the fire clawed at his eyelids, he relaxed, letting the relentless heat take him. Maybe this was what the angel was going to give him: release. His melting lips tried to smile as he stilled, waiting for the end to come.

Only the end never came. Once his body turned completely to bone and then ash, he fell asleep for a moment before waking up entirely whole, still in the fire.

Maybe it had all been a ruse. A clever trick by Meg to let him think he escaped only to throw him back into the room again, only to ignite him again and again. He felt his heart sink down into his stomach before the flames once again ate away at both of those organs.

This time he noticed other pains from the fire. While his hands turned to gray dust, he felt his long hair recede towards his head like a candle wick until his skull was alit. The blaze entered through his ears, through his nose, sinking deep inside his head to devour his brain completely. This action should have sent him right to unconsciousness, but until every part of Sam was burnt to a crisp, he was alert and awake. He felt every burn on every organ, every bone breaking in on itself until it became ash, felt the fire swallow him whole until it decided to spit him back up again.

There were no angels. There was no Heaven. There wasn’t even an Earth. This was all there could ever be. Fire. Fire and Meg and Pain.

He pleaded silently, as if maybe she could read his mind since he could not speak in the inferno. He would give in, he would listen to her commands, he would let himself be warped into a true servant, just anything to make the fire stop. None of the torture ever felt like this before, so vivid and completely invasive. He needed to be free from this.  
How foolish could he be? There was no escape from Hell. No escape from the torture. He wasn’t going to ever leave. No angel would ever feel any sympathy for Sam Winchester.

Winchester?

Before Sam could wonder where that name had come from, the fire cremated him once more, and he lost consciousness.

When he woke up next, the fire had vanished. Instead of all flame, the land he found himself in should have had a blue sky, but clouds of smoke filled the air and coated everything in sight with ash. The land was mountainous and rocky, not too different from the terrain of the pit apart from the large volcanoes in every direction. Patches of fire raged all around the plateau where he sat, making him cringe at the memory of the relentless blaze consuming him. The more he surveyed over the land, the more he noticed that nearly everything was on fire—that’s what filled the air with so much ash making it hard to breathe the air without coughing.

Hovering above him was the blue-eyed angel, careful hand running over Sam to heal him. He hadn’t seen this before when the angel used his hands to heal, a small blue light radiated from his palm, the same color that Sam first saw glowing in the pits. “You must have gotten separated from me when we went through the portal. It took me long to find you, you were in the heart of a fire trap not long from here. I don’t think we’ll be able to create any more pathways between the layers anymore, the magic is too volatile down here.”

Sam nodded slowly, trying to process the words but still feeling light-headed and weak. Sitting up was a challenge, because even though the angel completely healed him, everything felt so heavy still.

“We can rest here for the time being while I try to find a natural gate to the next layer. The fire takes a heavy toll on souls, so you will probably need more time to recuperate. Possibly a couple good rests are in order.”

Sam looked over the angel, studying his features again. He looked gentler now, maybe the lighting here was just different than the pit or maybe it was just due to the fact he wasn’t in such a rush. Without the intensity from before, the angel even appeared handsome with how blue his eyes looked, like deep oceans or a morning rain.

“Where am I?” asked the human in a hoarse voice. The smog definitely took a toll on his lungs, coating them with the thick ash. He could feel the black dust in his lungs every time he breathed in and out.

“Hell has several layers in order to protect its central realm—the pits where you just were. In order to get through to Hell’s gate, you must pass through each one. This is the second layer or second ring as some refer to them as. Their landscapes are constantly changing, but they’re made to be emotionally and physically draining to prevent the unworthy from escaping,” answered the angel, all matter-of-factly. “This layer is a literal inferno.”

Sam racked through his brain, trying to remember the name the angel had given him before. “Um, Cassiel?”

“Castiel,” the other corrected.

Sam nodded. “Right. Cas-tiel.” He looked up and down his savior a couple times, still shocked that Heaven’s fashion included business apparel. “You’re really an angel?”

“Yes.”

He stared, still looking over how bizarrely normal this supposed angel looked. He at least expected big fiery wings or even just some kind of body builder. Never had he imagined an angel looking like someone you’d just walk past on the street.

“Why did you come to Hell? I’ve never seen one of your kind before,” said Sam, averting his eyes once he noticed how he was staring at Castiel. Instead, he locked his eyes on one of the closer volcanoes in front of them, watching how the lava boiled inside its mouth and the magma flowed in waves down its sides to touch the fields of fire at its base. Remembering the feeling of being reduced to ash once more, he wrapped his arms around himself and decided to look back at his savior rather than at any more fire. He was pretty done on the whole fire thing.

“My mission was to save you, Sam. Heaven needs you safe and returned to Earth as a living soul.”

Despite understanding that full statement, that sentence hung heavy on Sam’s shoulders. What about him could be so important that Heaven sent one of its angels to pull him out of Hell? Surely, whatever he did to end up in Hell was worthy of the punishment. People don’t end up here accidentally. Sam had always figured that in life he’d fucked up big time—maybe killed someone or burned a church down, something big and sacrilegious enough. How could he be worth saving?

“I’m sorry, Castiel, but I don’t understand.”

Castiel looked confused for a moment before pausing to rethink his words. “I apologize, I’m not very adept at explaining things in a way that a human can understand. It’s been a couple centuries since I had interactions with your kind, even longer since I had a one-on-one conversation such as this.” He paused again, scanning over Sam’s expression. “There is a prophecy in Heaven about the Apocalypse. One of the ways that it can begin is with the freeing of Lucifer from his cage. After man was first born in the Garden, God had to lock Lucifer away deep within the core of Hell to keep him from tainting and destroying His creation. Lucifer can be freed from the cage if 66 Seals are broken. While there are hundreds of possible seals that can be broken, the first is that a righteous man will succumb to the temptations of Hell. According to the prophecies, that righteous man is you.”

A long moment of silence passed by as Sam tried to digest that information. Him—a lowlife pet of one of Hell’s most sadistic, a man cast away to be tortured for eternity. He was the key to preventing the Apocalypse. He was some sort of so-called “righteous man” that had to be saved from temptation? None of it made any sense. Sure, according to the few things he did know about himself, he might have saved a few people (though, in all honesty, he’d forgotten exactly what kind of a hunter he was) but there could be nothing divine about someone like him. Sam wasn’t worthy of prophecy. He was hardly sure he was worth saving period.

And what exactly was this temptation? What if he’d already succumbed or whatever Castiel meant? He’d prayed for death a million times each day, cried like a coward a million more, and let a demon torturer show off every weakness of his to the whole realm. How could he be sure to avoid temptation if he didn’t know what this temptation was or if he’d already given in? Perhaps he’d let down Heaven long ago when he first arrived in this wretched place—he couldn’t remember too well. What if Lucifer already was crawling out of his cage and about to destroy everything? All of this was too much on Sam’s heavy enough shoulders. He really, really needed to just lie down for a while. Or would giving in to idleness be part of that temptation he needed to avoid? There couldn’t be anything righteous about curling up on the ground and begging for release.

Whether it was due to his apparent awkwardness with human conversation or a genuine understanding that Sam needed time to process these monumental revelations, Castiel remained silent while Sam covered his face with his hands. Around ten minutes more of silence went by before he uncovered his face and locked eyes with the angel.

“How do we find the exit to the next circle or whatever?”

“It’s not that simple. It could take days, weeks, maybe even months before we find even a sign of it. Hopefully it doesn’t come to that, and there are some layers smaller than others, but it won’t be a quick trip to the gate.”

Sam straightened up, eyes open wide in alarm. “Months? We don’t have that kind of time if the world’s apparently on the verge of Apocalypse.”

“Time doesn’t work the way you think it does in Hell, Sam,” Castiel replied flatly. “You assume a month down here is a month on Earth, but it’s all relative. A day is practically a minute on Earth and a second in Heaven. We could spend years getting out of here, and still make it to Earth’s soil before the seasons change.”

The not-so-righteous man furrowed his eyebrows, scratching at his neck. “Wait, if time works differently down here, how long have I been in Hell? In Earth time, that is.”

“Around four months. Ten years in Hell is approximately a month on Earth from what I remember.”

Castiel seemed rather calm giving Sam this information, despite how much the human’s whole concept of reality was tearing apart piece by piece. Every hour of relentless torture, every second he thought that he couldn’t go on was just a blink of an eye to the people he’d left behind. The years of torment in which he’d lost his will to live, forgotten who he was, and been driven mad from the thousands of different ways Meg found to rip him apart from the both the outside in and inside out were just a couple of weeks? A mere season?

“I think I need a moment,” Sam murmured in a meek voice, getting up. There wasn’t really anywhere else he could wander off to with the ring of fire surrounding the plateau, and his instinct still remained positive that being too far from Castiel was a terrible idea, so he only walked a couple feet away to sit on top of a boulder, looking up at the ashy sky. When he concentrated, he could see the faint blue behind all the smoke.

Four months. If Sam got out of here, he’d still be the same age as when he died. The people he’d left behind would still remember him, would still be mourning him, would still care if he showed up at their door after just a few months. He’d be living in the same house, driving that same black car from his flashes of memory, maybe still going to those cafés with the woman he remembered. If he could remember his life, he might be able to start it all up over again. Four months was _nothing_. He lived in that damn room by itself for forty years, half a man’s life wasting away. Four months was just a long vacation, an extended leave from work, a summer vacation. Going back to Earth, he’d have a whole life left to lead. It could be like Sam had never been gone at all.

The hope that these thoughts gave him filled his chest like a deluge breaking through a weathered dam. This feeling of pure positivity felt so foreign to him now, the only hope he’d ever had down here being small shreds that something might happen some day—not this concrete knowledge of real possibilities for the future. In that room, he had always dreamed of getting out and being free, but he never had any idea of what freedom might entail, what it might taste like. Sam swore he could taste it on his lips like sweet sugar and every hour of excruciating pain at the demon’s hands felt worth it. He could go home, wherever home was or whatever home was. He could live again.

*

A few days went by that the two remained camped out on the plateau. Most of the time Sam spent resting, catching up on decades of sleep that he could not attain on the first layer of Hell. Castiel explained this to the man after he rose from his first twelve hour rest, how the forces in the pits not only had the ability to warp a soul’s memory, but also hinder their ability to rest, a need just as much spiritual as it was physical to the human body. The man saw this as ample incentive to sleep off the next few days while the angel searched for any sign of an exit onto the next plane.

No signs of anything could be found within five miles of their camp, so Castiel had to continue on further, carefully dodging any rivers of lava or fields of raging fire. He would not burn in the same way that Sam had, of course, but the heat still wasn’t pleasant and would only impede his search. Growing more nervous the further he strayed from the sleeping soul, he realized they couldn’t spend much more time in their current station. A bizarre current of energy flowed from the east, in the direction of two twin volcanoes with a narrow valley between them that appeared untouched by any of the flame, indicating that it may be a good place to start venturing into.

When Castiel returned to the plateau, he discovered Sam still fast asleep on the soot-coated ground.

Despite the fact that he had retired onto the most uncomfortable space, the man looked so peaceful in his heavy slumber. His eyelids gently draped over his golden-green, almond-shaped eyes; his little mouth ever so slightly open; his long and unruly hair hanging in strands over his face. Even though Sam appeared much larger than the average human with his legs that went on for miles, Castiel had never seen a grown man look so delicate. It was his duty to protect this soul, but without that predetermined prerogative, seeing the man like this would be enough to rouse his instinct to protect. It had been so long since he had the life of another in his hands that he forgot what it felt to be a protector. Seeing the bister strands draped over his face, Castiel longed to brush it away.

The angel’s eyes darted away at that thought. Thoughts like that were dangerous and would only cause complications on a mission. He was not Sam’s caregiver nor protector. He was Sam’s escort to Earth and nothing more. Allowing the seeds of any sort of feeling like that to take root would murky up his judgement and inevitably lead to misfortune just as it had before.

Castiel should be smarter than this. Castiel should know to keep his distance and focus on the task assigned to him by the archangel. He refused to let down Michael once again.

Sitting in silence, he waited patiently for the human to wake again, keeping his eyes fixated on the ground. Keeping his distance from the boy grew more difficult as Sam begin to mumble in his sleep, but he was resolute. No matter how much he desired to look into the other’s mind, see what filled his dreams and get to know this righteous man, he would not be swayed by primal emotions.

Due to how he tuned out the sounds of the sleeping man, Castiel didn’t sense it when the creatures creeped carefully up the sides of the plateau. Three enormous shadowy beasts with beady red eyes and razor sharp teeth stalked toward the duo, getting nearly fifteen feet from them before the angel glanced up and noticed their presence.

Hurriedly, he shook Sam awake from the deep sleep. “Sam, you need to get up and we have to go.” Sam was slow to rouse, but once he saw the massive hounds, he darted up from the ground and cowered behind Castiel.

From within his tan trench coat, Castiel pulled out a triple-edged blade and held it out in front of himself, pointing it at the center beast. The creature had no fear of the blade as it stalked closer toward them, snarling with a ravenous look in its empty eyes. Peeking over his shoulder at Sam for a moment, Castiel took a few gentle steps backward, keeping himself in between the man and the hounds. With every step back, the pack took a step forward. Assessing his surroundings, Castiel could see it would be difficult to attempt an escape from the brutes.

“Stay back,” he warned Sam in a low voice. Not wanting to risk using up any more of his grace, he would have to fight the beasts with nothing but the blade.

The snarling dog finally made a move, pouncing at Castiel. Holding one arm up to protect himself and keep the thing at bay, he tried desperately to slash at its stomach, missing at least seven times before finally landing a blow and causing it to retreat a few steps. The two others took the alpha’s fall as a signal to attack in unison, the left one going to gnash at the angel while the right one sneaking past to tackle Sam to the ground.

Sam lay paralyzed on the floor, a peculiar look in his eyes as the hound ripped through his chest with its claws. With his history of torture, it made sense that he stayed silent and less affected than most, but he almost appeared to be in a haze.

The second dog was easier for Castiel to fend off than its leader, but he only got a few swipes at its shoulders before the alpha leaped back into the fight, clawing at his face. Together, the two dogs pinned Castiel to the ground, but he was more focused on the man in the corner remaining prostrate as the vicious creature ripped through him. He managed to wrangle free of the Hell spawn holding him down, coming up behind the one on top of Sam in order to grab it by the back of its neck and jam the blade into its back as deeply as he could. When it stopped flailing in his grasp, Castiel tossed it off to the side like a rag doll where it remained limp and unmoving.

Hardly a moment more passed before he felt two pairs of fangs digging into him at the side and on his left shin. Kicking the one on his leg off, he cut at the brute on his side to cause it to loosen its grip so he could turn back to face them both. Unlike their kin, the other dogs—even with blood dripping from their ebony fur—didn’t falter.

The temptation to give in and simply use his leftover grace to smite them was great, but Castiel needed another plan since he didn’t think he could defend both himself and Sam much longer. He looked around him before he was struck with an idea by his surroundings.

Slinging the still shocked Sam over his shoulders like a backpack after pocketing his blade, Castiel rushed toward one of the sides of the plateau that wasn’t consumed entirely in flames and darted down the steep incline. The dogs bolted after them without hesitation, their attempts at snapping on their limbs and clawing at their backs only missing by a couple of inches. He continued the chase onward toward one of the shortest volcanoes, narrowly dodging the streams of lava as he trudged up the side.

The heat of the volcano wouldn’t kill the relentless Hellhounds by any means, but it would be able to trap them long enough for the two to escape easily toward the east. Only using some of his power, Castiel could shield himself and his companion as they jump into the pit of lava.

He could feel it when they got close to the top, the scorching heat stinging at his face like a thousand furious wasps buzzing around him. The slope of the volcano grew to the point where he had to switch to a climb for the last feet, careful to make sure the man still hung securely from his back as they surmounted the volcano.

The steepness of the formation deterred the hounds marginally, only giving Castiel a moment to prepare himself. Grasping onto Sam tightly with both of his hands, he whistled the dogs over while stepping back to the very edge. Being this close, he could already feel the tremendous torridness of the pool stroke at his legs and melt at the soles of his shoes. The two black creatures raced toward them, not slowing as they got close to making impact. Just as they began to pounce, and just as Sam started to regain awareness and try to protest what the angel was about to do, Castiel leaped into the mouth of the volcano. The dogs fell in right behind them before they could attempt to slow down and save themselves from tripping in, and all four of them were submerged in the igneous, red pool.

A large blue orb emerged from the pool moments later, a floating bubble of light carrying its two inhabitants safely back to the rim. Once they were back on solid rock, the protective barrier fizzled away leaving the two untouched by the heat.

“Holy shit,” Sam muttered, fingers raking through his hair.

“Are you all right? You seemed shaken back there when they attacked,” Castiel noted.

The taller one nodded, looking down at the pool of lava. “Yeah, yeah, I’m good. It just reminded me of something, kind of a bad flashback.”

At first, the angel assumed that it must remind him of some sort of torture he went through in the pit. Hellhounds often travelled around the first layer, as well as apparently this one, so the demons utilized them whenever opportunity struck. However, after a few moments he realized another explanation. “You remember when they dragged you down here now, don’t you?”

Sam nodded again, getting a distant look in his eyes again for a few seconds. “I don’t understand. Is it always like that when you come to Hell?”

Castiel shook his head. “No, you were a special case.” He turned away from the mouth and started back toward the side of the volcano. “If you want, I can explain it while we continue on. I think I found a path to a possible gate. After the attack, I really don’t think it will be a good idea to stay at that site any longer.” He gestured for his companion, and the two began their dismount back on to level land.

They advanced toward the valley between the twin peaks, waiting until the coast was clear before conversing again.

“A majority of the people in Hell are here because of what they did during their lives,” Castiel explained, eyes darting around ahead of him to make sure they wouldn’t come across any more creatures. “A lot of murderers, rapists, unapologetic criminals, and those that dabbled in witchcraft fill up the pit, but another population grows more and more each day. People that sell their souls to demons.”

“I sold my soul? How? Why?”

He glanced back at the human. “There’s a specific class of demon that have the ability to travel easily between Hell and Earth. They’re called crossroads demons because humans can summon them using simple magic at a crossroad. The demons will negotiate a deal with the human that summoned them, that they can have anything they wish as long as they sign away their soul in the process. The demon will give them usually ten years—although in your case, you only got one year—and after that time, a pack of Hellhounds emerge onto the Earth and drag them to Hell.”

Sam visibly shivered at the thought. “What did I sell my soul for?”

“You had an older brother who died saving your life, so you tried to return the favor by making the deal.”

This fact seemed to ease Sam a little, as if knowing he hadn’t sold his soul for something frivolous and fleeting like fortune and fame comforted him. Castiel did admit that he saw it as a more noble deed when it came to demon deals. In a way, he sympathized and even empathized. Were he human, he would have done whatever he could to save his own sibling, but angels didn’t have souls to sell.

“Do you know his name? I feel like it’s on the tip of my tongue, but I just can’t seem to remember. I can see his face, even his car, but I just can’t. . .”

With an apologetic look in his eyes, Castiel shook his head. “I’m sorry. It wasn’t mentioned when they assigned me to retrieve you. I only know the very basics of what happened to you, nothing further.”

“It’s all right. Thank you for telling me.”

The conversation dwindled after that point. The duo hiked on further for the rest of the night, growing closer and closer to the source of the energy. Finding another safe highland, they stopped so that Sam could rest for the night. It would only take a few more days before they reached the gate at this rate.

*

A week passed by with long periods of walking and even longer periods of rest for the man. Castiel grew more impatient with each slumber, but he couldn’t deny Sam any time that he asked to sleep due to the fact that it was visible how much he improved with each bought of long hibernation. Each night’s rest appeared to wash away a month of Hell, a month of torment, a month of sadness. Every time he woke up, Castiel saw what could almost be described as a bounce to his step. Sam was almost as eager as Castiel to get out to face another day back home.

“What’s Heaven like?” Sam asked when they were a few miles off from the source of the energy. Most of the journey went by in silence, making it seem strange that the man would ask a question like this out of the blue.

“It depends,” replied Castiel awkwardly. “Do you mean Heaven for you or Heaven for me?”

“Either. Both.”

The angel pursed his lips, considering where to start. “Heaven is not a clear cut land exactly. Just like the universe itself, it is constantly expanding and changing. Few people know that Heaven is mostly empty, open pockets waiting for the next souls to arrive. For the angels, however, our base is a finite island within its center. Everything there is clean and carefully constructed. The walls in every corridor are entirely white and stainless with windows showing out into the universe. The structure is a perfect grid system with directions all written out in Enochian, the angel language. This makes it incredibly easy for angels to navigate, but in the case another creature came to Heaven somehow, they would be lost in its intricate labyrinth. In the relatively smaller space, there are tens of thousands of angels and nearly millions of different rooms holding precious items and documents. In the heart of the angel’s land is the armory of Heaven, which houses some of the most important objects in the whole universe, only to to be used in the case of the Apocalypse.

“Branching out from this island are all the individual Heavens of all God’s favorite creations that made it to Heaven. When it comes to the individual Heavens, they are entirely manufactured to the desires and dreams of the inhabitant—or in some cases inhabitants, as is the case with soulmates. With careful navigation, souls can venture from one Heaven to the next, but most choose to remain forever in their own assigned spot. After all, it is what your kind believes to be paradise. Few every want to leave, even for a second.”

“So the clouds, the pearly gates, that’s all just bullshit?”

Castiel gave Sam a puzzled look. “It is quite possible if a soul is very fond of pearled gates and atmospheric structures that those may appear in their Heaven.” The comment had gone completely over the angel’s head, making the tall human let out a little laugh that earned him a second confused look.

“After all of this, that sounds absolutely wonderful. I hope this righteous man business lands me a free pass. At least a discount or even a word of recommendation.”

With thoughts of paradise in his head, Sam kept on with more hope and cheer in his head that even if he wasn’t on his way right to Heaven, soon he’d be a step closer to Earth.

All the hope and cheer made it even more devastating when they got to the spot where the portal should be, only to find a wall of flames.

Eyes wide with fear, Sam looked over at his savior, the look on his face asking, _What do we do?_ Castiel stared into the blaze, looking over it for a couple minutes before grabbing Sam by the hand and pulling him toward it.

“Castiel, what the hell are you doing?” he demanded, trying to pull back. The angel’s grip was too strong for him to escape, but he kept trying to tug at his arm regardless.

“This has to be it, Sam. There’s nothing else that could possible lead us onward. This is it.”

“Have you gone completely out of your mind? This can’t—This isn’t it. It must be further on or something. There is no way I am going back into that thing. There has to be some other way out of here.”

The shorter stopped, looking up at Sam with a controlled look in his blue eyes. “Sam, I will not let what happened to you the first day here happen again. I would not put you in a position like this unless I thought this would get us back to our own realms.”

“I don’t know about this. What if it’s just some sort of trap or what if it just brings us back to where we started? What if it’s just another fire that’s going to burn me again?”

“Sam, take a deep breath,” Castiel commanded, moving the hand that previously pulled Sam by the wrist and placing it on his shoulder. He didn’t know much about humans, but he tried to use all his knowledge of how to calm them down to help get Sam to cooperate. “My mission is to get you back safely. I don’t want you to get hurt any more than you do. We will walk through together, and I won’t let us get separated like the last time.”

Sam sucked in a low breath slowly before giving a small, jerky nod. “Okay. Okay.”

Before Castiel could reach down for it, Sam already grabbed at his hand.

“Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

With that, Castiel guided the man slowly into the flames.


	3. Cold, Cold Winter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Every step felt like it would be his last, that he would inevitably collapse in on himself. Eventually he did, landing face first onto the snow with a heavy sigh. 
> 
> A second after his tumble, he heard a crack."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: While there is no explicit violence in this chapter, there are references and descriptions of drowning. Take care of yourselves. 
> 
> This chapter's probably the shortest out of them all, but hopefully then I can get the next one polished up quickly to post.

  
_”It sure been a cold, cold winter, Lord.  
My feet been dragging 'cross the ground,  
And the fields has all been brown and fallow,  
And the springtime take a long way around.”_  
— **“Winter” by The Rolling Stones**  


In sharp contrast to the heat of the flames, the freezing breeze clawed at Sam’s bare skin worse than the hounds. After the filter of ash giving everything a dark tint in the world before, the pure white of the snow shocked his eyes, making him believe for a few moments that he had been blinded. He hadn’t seen so much white since Christmas Eve on a hunt that took him and his family up to Alaska. Several people had gone missing in a remote town due to what turned out to be a pack of werewolves hiding in the snowy land. The hunt was too far off to drive, so it had been the first time that Sam ever flew in a plane. In the back of his mind, he always pretended that had been his Christmas present, even if most of the trip consisted of trying to calm down his older brother. His older brother. . . What was his name? The flood of memory hit a brick wall when Sam got hung up on the name once again.

Seeing in any direction was next to impossible with the thick blizzard swirling around them, making everything look like a white blur. Sam, arms wrapped around his shivering torso, looked over at Castiel for guidance. 

The angel didn’t look cold, despite the snow sprinkled in his hair and on his eyelashes, but he seemed to notice quickly how chilled Sam was as he rushed to his side. “Here, I can handle this weather fine. Weather doesn’t bother me like it does you. You take this, please” he said, stripping off the khaki trench coat as well as the black suit jacket underneath. 

Sam gave the clothes a weary gaze before deciding a tight, constricting jacket would be better than freezing for however long it took to get to the next layer. However, the suit jacket was _too_ tight to get on his shoulders, but the long coat was just big enough to fit. He handed the suit jacket back to the angel before buttoning up the trench coat, glad at least one of the layers fit before glancing down at his feet, buried in the harsh snow.

Castiel shared his gaze down at the freezing feet. “I’m sorry. I think my vessel’s shoes are too small for you to fit in. Would you like to give them a try?”

Sam tried to give a little smile as he managed a shrug. “It’s fine. I mean, if my toes froze off, they just grow back, right?”

“I supposed so.” Castiel gave him a strange look, eyebrows furrowed. “That seems very unpleasant. Maybe there’s another solution. I could carry you?”

The human shook his head, though the thought alone amused him. “No, you’ll just look strange walking around some more with a man twice your size dangling from your back. The demons might judge you,” he teased.

The angel gave him an even stranger look. 

“Right. Humor isn’t really a heavenly thing, is it?”

“Not particularly.” He paused for a moment before amending his answer. “Well, not for the most part.”

They went off in search of a shelter, but seeing through the snow and keeping up against the frigid winds became a greater challenge than the bitter temperatures. While Castiel kept on with at least some ease, Sam found himself falling behind a lot, needing the angel to repeatedly heal his feet whenever they became too numb and too frozen for him to walk any further. Castiel could heal any permanent damage done to his skin, but nothing could make the brisk cold leave his fragile bones. It permeated through him worse than the fire had. The fire would ravage his body, break him down, and then be done with him; the cold was a slower villain, sneaking into his veins and making a home in his body forever. 

Nearly a full day went by and they still were walking. Sam began to doubt that they’d ever find shelter, they’d just be doomed to wander around until the cold just caused his bones to shatter or leave him a human popsicle buried deep within the fluffy whiteness. Being a popsicle didn’t sound like a very terrible idea. After all, if he were frozen solid and laid to rest in a wintry grave, that meant that he didn’t have to travel anymore. With all the times his feet actually almost started to fall off during their walk, the pros began to outweigh the cons. Every step felt like it would be his last, that he would inevitably collapse in on himself. Eventually he did, landing face first onto the snow with a heavy sigh. 

 

A second after his tumble, he heard a crack.

That couldn’t be good.

Before he could call out to Castiel who hadn’t noticed his fall, the ground gave way and he slid down into the hidden lake below the snowy landscape. 

Underneath the ice, Sam thrashed around desperately, unable to find the hole where he had slid through. The choking feeling of cold water flooding into his mouth when he tried to scream out for help clutched at his throat. Another memory hit him as he tried to stay afloat in the arctic lake. A house haunted by a vengeful spirit of a child trying to take the life of another. He saw a little girl drowning at the bottom of a swimming pool, face going pale as she landed onto the ground gently. An odd calmness had spread over her face, almost like she were just sleeping peacefully in the watery bed until Sam grabbed her from her aquatic slumber and brought her to the surface. He imagined himself as the girl now as his eyes closed, the struggle wearing him down. Would he look as peaceful as she had now? And just like the girl, he could feel someone else grabbing him now. He tried to open his eyes, seeing a foggy figure above him, pulling him up to the surface. 

Falling on top of his companion once the other yanked him through a fresh hole in the ice, Sam coughed up icy water onto Castiel until they were both almost equally soaked. Now soaking wet, the chilling wind cut deeper into him, so cold that everything started to feel too hot—like he’d gone full circle and was now on fire.

“Th-thanks,” Sam coughed out, shivering violently. 

“I know you said not to before, but maybe it would be a good idea for me to carry you now?” Castiel offered, looking over the human with concern. He started to reach for him before pulling back his hand quickly. “You don’t look like you can do much more walking, I fear.”

Sam sighed, nodding. “That might not be too bad of an idea.”

He at least made it easy for the angel, standing up carefully and wrapping his arms around Castiel’s neck. First instinct told him not to jump on the man since he was smaller than Sam, but once the smaller tried to hoist him up, he complied and hopped on his back. After all the cold he experienced both inside and outside the water, the angel felt so warm to lean against, like a walking radiator carrying him to safety. Relaxing against him was too easy, Sam resting his head on Castiel’s shoulder. He could have sworn when his head rested upon the man carrying him that Castiel pulled him just a little bit tighter against him. That couldn’t possibly be, though. Castiel was an angel, a hundred and ten percent serious about this mission and with nothing else in mind. Regardless, Sam allowed himself to enjoy the special treatment, it being so long since anyone had treated him like this. Even if it was just for a higher purpose, it was nice to be the one being saved.

“Thanks, Cas. Thanks for pulling me out.”

Castiel faltered for a moment before responding. “You’re welcome.”

*

Days went by without a sign of a shelter they could use, and Castiel lost hope that there was anything but snow and ice in this layer of Hell. Not even any other creatures appeared to linger through any of these parts. Just the two of them, wandering around aimlessly in an immense globe of frozen and unfrozen water. Perhaps that was the trap of this land: there was nothing but snow and to reach the next layer they’d have to just drown themselves underwater. Castiel scoffed at how absurd that idea was. 

Sam drifted in and out of sleep for most of the journey, all his time awake spent switching constantly between Castiel carrying him and trying to regain his pride by standing up on his own. He never lasted long walking, however, too weakened and slowed down by all the cold to have the will or the power to move. Cas could see the light in his eyes that he gained in the last layer start to dwindle the longer they went on without any sight of anything. Though he wouldn’t admit it to himself, this tugged at something deep down inside of Castiel. Eventually one day when Sam closed his eyes and fell sound asleep, Castiel laid him down delicately onto the snow, stripping off his suit jacket and placing it under his head so he wouldn’t have his head soaked, and got to work packing the snow together to form a small structure. Architecture was far from being his strong suit, but with enough effort and a little bit of precious grace, he scrambled together a makeshift igloo that just barely fit the two of them. At the very least, the shelter would protect them against the bitter winds and the constant blizzard. He pulled Sam inside as he crawled in, sitting beside the human as he slept soundly. 

In the little structure, Sam felt so close to him, even more so then when Cas had carried him around on his back. All he could hear in the igloo were his gentle snores and the way he shuffle around in his sleep. He’d be damned, too, if he didn’t think that every time Sam shuffled around in his sleep he moved just a fraction of an inch closer towards Castiel. 

Perhaps this was another torture of Hell. These tempting feelings that persisted whenever he looked at Sam. The way his heart stopped when Sam went missing in the ice before, as if the boy could fall back through into the pit with one wrong move. Why should it bother him so much what happens? It should bother him more with the thought that a mistake could jeopardize his shot at redemption, but down here sitting barely inches away from the righteous man, redemption didn’t seem as important as protecting this man from any more torment. 

Sam was redemption with the way the soul looked up at him like a beacon. Sam didn’t know about his past. Sam didn’t know what he had done. Sam didn’t know that he let his sister die. All Sam saw was his holy savior in Castiel.

No, no, no. That was too hopeful. Castiel’s sin would always be how foolish he was. That is why he failed before, and that will be why he fails again if he doesn’t get it together. The needs of Heaven come before any fleeting emotion the angel may have about his task. This human is nothing, a mere blink of the eye in the grand scheme of things. In another century or two he will be dead and forgotten, every atom of his body going out to be a part of other organisms, leaving no trace of the boy. Castiel will have another mission, another human to protect or another artifact to retrieve or another disaster to prevent. Sam will return to Earth, maybe have offspring, and then die in the blink of an eye. His grandchildren may be dead before Castiel even returns to Earth for another task. This was the natural order for human life. Immortality was the angel’s burden. Attaching oneself to these temporary creatures was useless and only lead to disaster.

Back in the days when he led thousands of angelic soldiers, he would be the first one called if an angel were at risk of becoming attached to human kind in ungodly ways. He would always be the first to scold, remind his brothers of the Nephilim that had been the product of the angel’s sin. The Nephilim had nearly destroyed half the Earth before they were taken down and obliterated along with their fathers. Yet, here he was, wrestling with his own budding feelings for this delicate, awkward creature. Even here in Hell where these few weeks together meant absolutely nothing to the outside worlds. 

Castiel had to leave, had to get away from the boy just so he could think. He didn’t have to be in here with him, just standing guard outside or even venturing off to find another gate. That would be for the best. 

Crawling out, Castiel immediately pulled out his blade when he saw something lying on the ground about fifteen feet outside the igloo, peeking out from inside the snow. He braced himself, looking around in every direction for who might have left it, but not seeing anyone. 

Cautiously, he approached the object, seeing that it was a small purple pendant. He picked it up with the same level of uneasy care, feeling a wave of energy similar to the one the gate leading to this layer had given off. The charm was shaped like an arrow head, and as he held it, the pendant lifted itself up so that its point faced to his left. In the snow where he found it originally now appeared a small, golden note. The angel picked it up and read the red writing inside it.

_Looked like you boys could use a bit of help. Consider this one on me._

_XOXO_

He stared, puzzled by what exactly signified “XOXO” before he looked to see the signature.

_The King of the Crossroads_

Castiel had never heard of that title before, equally puzzled as he was with the line before. The only hierarchy to Hell was that all the demons kept up the business that Lucifer began. There was no other king than the fallen angel. 

Looking at the charm again, Cas was certain it had to be a trap of some sort, but the flow of energy seemed like the only lead with any promise. With nothing else in this frozen wasteland, a trap was better than wandering around in a direction that probably was opposite from where they needed to go. He gazed back once more toward the igloo where he could still faintly hear the sound of Sam asleep. The man would be all right without him for the time being. Holding the pendant out in front of him, he followed its guidance out into the blizzard.

*

Sam awoke as a gentle hand began shaking him from his dreams. “Cas?” he asked in a small, tired voice, but instead of his angel he saw a woman smiling down at him.

“Sammy, wake up,” the woman said in a voice that was so oddly familiar. The woman had mid-length, wavy blond hair that came down to rest gently at the top of her gown that was as white as the snow she sat on. Her skin looked soft and fair, and her eyes were a warm blue-green. Sam couldn’t pull up any concrete memories of the woman, but just by looking up at her he knew exactly who she was. 

“Mom.”

The woman beamed down at him, her hand as soft as feathers and as warm as the sun stroking over his messy hair. She was so warm, radiating a light heat throughout the snowy enclosure that made Sam feel like he was wrapped up in the thickest blanket ever despite her heat not doing any damage to the snow around him. Her arms encircled him, and all his feelings of the cold air disappeared completely. Her embrace felt like he was laying on a beach on top of warm sand, the sun tickling at his nose and his cheeks. 

Sam continued to search through his brain as he enjoyed her hold, looking for some piece of his mother in his memories. He could remember his brother and his father, but he fell short every time he thought he could picture her. All he could bring up were still pictures of her sitting in frames, littered around the black car and in his father’s wallet. After some time, he gave up, deciding that it didn’t matter. All that mattered now was that he was in the arms of someone that loved him, and her love blocked away the winter that had penetrated him for the last week. 

“My baby boy, I’m so happy I found you,” she said in a voice sweeter than honey, hugging him closer before pulling back to look at his face. “We need to leave, Sammy. I can bring you home where it’s warm and dry. We can be a complete family again. Would you like that, sweetheart?”

Sam grinned and nodded. “Yeah, Mom, I would like that a lot.”

It felt too good to be true, the heat she gave off still flowing through him as she held his hand and guided him out of the igloo and into the snowstorm. Well, what used to be a snowstorm. The ceaseless blizzard had finally stopped, giving way to a sun that began to melt away at the frozen tundra. As the snow melted away, Sam was surprised to see green blades of grass start to reach out from underneath all the white. Bright yellow daisies popped up out of the ground as well, new life crawling out to see the new season.

Spring. 

“Sammy, you have to hold my hand. I’ll bring you home. Don’t let go,” Mom instructed, bringing Sam with her as she went off towards a log cabin couple blocks away. In a daze, he nodded again, his grip on her hand tightening. All the color emerging around him appeared so beautiful, so unreal after all the snow and ice he’d seen the past few days. In all his time in Hell, he forgot what flowers smelled like, but now the rich aroma of fresh roses wafted up toward him when they passed by a beautiful garden. 

“We’re almost there, Sammy. Don’t let go.”

“Sam!”

Another voice broke through Sam’s daze, this one much harsher and lower than his mother’s. Sam looked around, unable to find the source of the scream. Perhaps it was just his imagination. 

“Sam, you have to let go of her. She’s not real.”

“Sammy, don’t stop, we have to get moving. We’re almost home.”

Home. The word rattled something strange within Sam’s chest. He paused in his tracks, looking over his mother. The white gown—he had never actually seen this before. It had only been described to him before by someone else and a piece of the description was missing. Something terrible was off about his mother.

Her hand grew hotter the longer he stood still. “Sammy, we have to go. Everyone else is waiting.”

“Sam, let go! It's a trap.”

Sam didn’t have a block on his memories of her. Sam never met his mother. Not properly, anyway. She died when he was around six months old when his house caught fire. The fire had started in his nursery where she had run in to check up on him after hearing a noise. His older brother, only four years old at the time, managed to carry him out of the burning house while his father failed to save her. The rest of the family all survived, but that was the night all their lives changed forever. Not even able to speak, Sam became a hunter that night when the demon Azazel killed his mother. 

Mom’s eyes, staring up over at Sam angrily, began to glow yellow as a red spot began to grow on her stomach, staining the nightgown with fresh,scarlet blood. 

“I said, we have to go, Sam,” the creature resembling his mother said in gravelly voice. Sam jerked his hand out of her grip and got hit once more by the intense cold of the blizzard. Everything was once again coated in the white snow blowing through the air. 

Another pair of arms came to wrap around Sam, pulling him away from her. Not far behind her was a black vortex on the ground that seemed to grow. 

“That thing is trying to pull you back to the pit,” Castiel warned, positioning himself in front of Sam to pull out his angel blade. “It took on the shape of your mother so that you would trust it enough to follow it.” He plunged the blade into the creature’s heart, causing it to fall into the snow. The black vortex shrunk in until it disappeared entirely. The creature also began to fade away from its spot on the snow, leaving behind a glowing hole on the snow. Castiel held out a violet amulet that appeared to point toward the hole.

“I found this charm outside of our shelter while you were asleep. I used it to track the portal to the next layer, but little did I know that portal was moving back towards you and was an awful lot faster than I was.” 

“The creature was the portal?”

Castiel nodded. “It would appear so. Are you ready to continue onward?”

Sam let out a hard laugh. “No, not at all. Let's go.”

“Was that more humor?” 

The human smiled slightly at Cas. “Let’s just go before we get chased by an angry snowman.” 

Castiel managed a smile, the first smile that Sam had seen on his face before taking his hand and jumping with him into the portal.


	4. Ghost Song

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Kind of looks like. . . like the Dagobah system.”

 

“ _Choose they croon the ancient ones_  
_The time has come again_  
_Choose now, they croon_  
_Beneath the moon_  
_Beside an ancient lake_  
_Enter again the sweet forest_  
_Enter the hot dream_  
_Come with us_  
_Everything is broken up and dances._ ”  
— **”Ghost Song” by The Doors**

Sam landed in the fourth layer of Hell with a literal splash, flopping down into a filthy pond that was about three feet deep. Instinct and memories of being incased in the icy water caused him to start thrashing around through the water until a calming hand landed on his shoulder. Nothing was keeping him in the pool or attacking him. It was just water, even if it stung his eyes when he landed in it.

He stood up slowly in the pool, the mossy top only coming to about his waist. Instead of smoke or snow, this realm was covered in lively green. All the surface of the bog was filled in about the same amount of water as where they had landed, and all the water had a thin layer of vibrant vegetation covering up the murky brown pond below. Thin, winding trees spurted out from the depths of the murky marsh, blocking out all clear views of the sky above with the thick, leafy canopy they created above. The only indication to whether it was day or night in the swamp was that everything below the canopy was lit up and easy to see. Strangest of all, the temperature felt oddly comfortable and temperate. Sure, it was very humid and far hotter than the layer before, but once Sam stripped off the trench coat he borrowed from Cas, the climate didn’t seem too bad. A cloud of gnats flew by him, making him slap at them in annoyance, but none of them tried to bite him, only buzzed about his face gracelessly.

“Well, this doesn’t seem too bad,” Sam noted, handing the khaki coat back to its original owner. “Kind of looks like. . . like the Dagobah system.”

“What is a Dagobah system?” Cas asked.

Sam thought for a moment, trying to put a source to the random mental connection he had made. “It’s from. . . from Star Wars. It’s a movie from a long, long time ago, I think.”

“A movie,” Cas murmured, looking intensely concentrated trying to remember what movies were. “Oh, of course, the moving pictures.”

Sam let out a soft chuckle, more images of his old favorite coming to his mind. “When we get out of this, we’re going to watch Star Wars together. Being an angelic higher being doesn’t give you any excuse not to see it.” He smiled as a fresh memory popped into his head, musing over it out loud. “Whenever we used to stay at a motel with an operational VHS player, my brother would dig the tapes out of the trunk and we would watch them. The Star Wars trilogy were the only VHS’s we had—well along with another movie. The Princess Bride. That one was my dad’s favorite movie, he could recite practically every line along with the movie. We always had to yell at him to shut up so we could actually listen to the characters.” He laughed more sincerely at this memory before he realized he had begun to ramble, blushing slightly. “Sorry.”

Castiel smiled back at the human. “I’m glad to see that more of your memory is returning to you.” He pulled out the violet amulet which pointed up behind Sam before placing it around his neck. “We should start heading in this direction at least. It should bring us closer.” Stepping through the shallow water proved to be more difficult than expected, slowing the pair down greatly. While it was better than his toes freezing off, getting anywhere would end up taking twice as long and be twice as tiring.

“Where did you get that thing, anyway? You didn’t have it before, did you?” Sam said, trying to climb through the tight gaps in the trees.

Unable to get through some of the dense vegetation, Cas pulled his blade out from within his suit jacket and began slashing out a passage for the two of them. He hesitated before answering the question. “No. I found it outside in the last layer. Someone must have left it there.” Castiel had the kind of look on his face that indicated to Sam that he was leaving something out of this story.

“You just picked it up and started using it? How do we know it’s not cursed or something?”

“So far, it only helped. While it led me on a loop, it did bring me back to you before that creature sent you back to the first layer. I rather see how long we can use this object before it turns on us instead of wandering around aimlessly. We lucked out in the second layer. Who knows how long we would’ve been trapped there had we gone the wrong direction?”

Sam wanted to argue with this logic, but unfortunately the angel had a point. It wasn’t as if they had a whole lot of other options, even if something felt awfully suspicious about this magic artifact just appearing out of nowhere. Besides, Sam trusted that the angel’s magic sixth sense would be able to tell if the pendant were giving out bad vibes. Glancing up, Sam caught sight of a black bird flying overhead in the direction they were headed, and something about this swamp made him feel a little queasy. Every other place they’d traveled to had tried to trap him or attack him somehow multiple times. No matter how calm the swamp seemed now, eventually it would turn on him.

He almost had a heart attack when something caught on his foot, causing him to trip and slide down into the muddy water. Clutching at the nearest branch to hoist himself up, he hastily turned around only to see it had been a fallen tree trunk. Sam sighed deeply in relief before Castiel came to help haul him back up onto his feet.

“Are you all right? Did something happen?”

Sam chuckled. “Yeah, just a tree. All this walking has made me clumsy, I guess.”

“Once we find a patch of dry land, we can rest for the remainder of the day and night,” Cas promised, patting at Sam’s shoulder. The gesture felt very awkward and unrehearsed, making it apparent that Cas was new to human interactions. It only took a couple hours of wading through the marsh until they found a piece of relatively dry land.

Sam happily flopped down onto the earth, grinning once his legs were finally free. A thin layer of mud coated him from the waist down, and he grimaced when he saw how his feet looked like raisins with how pruney they’d gotten from the watery trail.

“I swear, if the next layer is a desert and I don’t have to see water for a month, I really won’t mind at all,” he grumbled, resting his head on the moist land.

The angel settled down beside Sam, resting his arms on his knees while looking around at all the plant life. Even with all its nuisances, Sam thought it bizarre that a land so rich in life and color would be a part of Hell. Take out the water, and the setting actually seemed pretty nice and didn’t fit in with the other two places they traversed.

“When I was here last, one of the layers was a desert,” Castiel said. “I wouldn’t wish for that, it was very unpleasant. Out of nowhere, we came across flesh eating sink holes that trapped you up to three days before spitting you out. The rattlesnakes could read a mortal’s mind.”

“On second thought, that sounds terrible.” Sam tried to think what exactly would happen if a rattlesnake could read his mind, but decided against asking. “When were you last in Hell? Do you routinely come down to help out souls that are a part of holy prophecies? Is that kind of your job up there?”

Cas shook his head. “No, I’ve only been to Hell once before this. It was a couple thousand years ago, a long time before your ancestors were even thought up. I was a General in Heaven then, and my second-in-command accompanied me on a journey to retrieve a tablet.”

“What was so important about the tablet?”

“There are several tablets that God created just before leaving our universe, all written down and dispersed throughout the world by Metatron, the Scribe of Heaven. Over time, all of them have been collected and stored in the libraries of Heaven except for the Demon Tablet. It contains all the secrets of Hell and demons, even including ways to close off the entrance to Hell completely.”

Sam sat up slightly. “You said all of the tablets have been collected except that one. Didn’t you collect that one? Why hasn’t it been used yet?”

“I didn’t collect it,” Castiel replied in a quiet voice, practically a whisper.

“Oh.” The human looked down, feeling bad for having pressed on. However, his curiosity beat out his politeness as he asked one more question, “What happened?”

“We were followed by a band of demons lead by Lilith. We were able to fend them off for a while, but eventually they ambushed us. In the struggle, the tablet was destroyed and only I managed to escape back to Earth.” Castiel turned away after that. “I think it’s best that you rest now, Sam.”

Sam took that to be a kinder means of telling him to shut up, so he ceased his questioning and laid back down. Looking up toward the treetops, he could see the small cracks of an orange sky through the dense canopy. The sun must have been setting in whatever direction was west, he couldn’t tell through the vegetation. Another memory came to him as he watch the sky changing colors. He saw the green eyed man—his brother—standing in front of him, clutching onto a hand gun pointed at a figure in front of them. His brother was a good shot, but on that day he didn’t shoot fast enough at the assailant before the vicious man came at him with the knife, driving it into his chest. Soon both of them fell to the ground, their blood mixing on the pavement below. Sam reached out to grab his brother, hold him up and apply pressure to the stab wound, but it was too big and his brother bled too fast. He saw the moment the light left those green eyes before they closed for good—or at least what should have been for good. He still felt the tears rolling down his face as he clutched his older brother, his protector, his mentor against him.

Then another memory struck him. Whiskey stench heavy on his breath, he stumbled late at night out of a local bar and down the street until he came to a crossroads in the dirt road. He looked into the wooden box he’d brought with him, saw the white yarrow, the black cat’s bone, the dirt he’d collected from the graveyard, and one of the only pictures he had of himself—him smiling back at university, wearing a sweater with “Stanford” written across it in bold letters, a beer in his hand. With his bare hands, he dug a hole into the center of the crossroads and placed the box down within it, hurriedly tossing sand on top of it until the box couldn’t be seen any longer. He turned around, and there she was.

 

“Sam Winchester, the mighty hunter, calling me up out of the blue like a desperate booty call,” she had said, looking him over like a piece of fresh meat. “This is precious. I heard along the grape vine that you went and got the rest of your family killed. Your big brother is finally gone to family supper with Ma and Pa, huh? All because of you. You know, in a way, all of them are dead because of you. Adorable.”

“I don’t have time for your preamble. I’m here to make a deal.”

“A deal? Really?” She grinned at him, amused. “Aren’t you the hunter that tried to kill my sister a couple months back because she was making deals? Now, what? You’ve decided to convert? Or is this another clever hunter rouse to try to exorcise me as well? Don’t you know it’s foolish to rob the same bank twice?”

“I swear, if you don’t shut up right now I will send you back to Hell where you belong,” Sam growled.

“I know you won’t, Sammy. We both know I’m the only one that can give you what you want tonight, if that’s what you’re _really_ here for.”

He went stiff as she walked around him in a wide circle.

“Let me guess. Your soul in exchange for Big Brother? Sound about right?”

“Ten years with him back. That’s all I’m asking, okay? Just ten years, and I won’t try to fight it or escape the deal. I’ll go when it’s my time, just like everyone else.”

She scoffed. “You must be joking me.”

“That’s the exact same deal you always give. Please, I’m begging you. No games and no tricks.”

Sighing, she placed her finger on her chin, feigning to think for a moment. “How’s about this: one year and then I collect.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me. There is no way I’m selling my soul for just one more year!”

“Then I guess it’s time for you to start shopping for caskets. Get a chestnut one, the color would go great with his complexion. Or lack thereof.”

“Ten years and I’ll stop hunting completely. I won’t exorcise another demon. We’ll both retire.”

“Look at you, trying to bargain with _me_. This is far too good. Do you have a camera?”

“Five years. Five years, I’m begging you.”

“No.”

“Then three! Please, just anything more than that.”

She crossed her arms, sighing again. “You know, I shouldn’t even be doing this at all. After the stunt you pulled before, you and your brother have been blacklisted. I got a soft spot for you hunters, though, so I’m offering you the only deal you’re going to get anywhere. I bring your brother back, reunite Sid and Nancy for a year and then I collect. Either you say yes, or you start shopping for cemetery lots before he starts to rot. Now, what’s it going to be, Sam?”

“I’ll do anything. Please, just give me more time.”

“All right, if you’re going to keep playing this game, I’m going to have to just leave and find actual paying customers.”

Sam bit his lip before giving in. “You’ll bring him back? No strings attached?”

“As long as you don’t try to get out of the deal, he’ll be back in one piece. Good as new.”

“Fine.”

“Fine?”

“I’m in.”

With a wicked smile, she leaned in, red lips pressing against Sam’s.

In present time, Sam blinked out of his daze. Those memories had been more vivid than any other so far, he could practically smell the dust of the crossroads and the metal odor of his brother’s blood. By this time, the orange streaks had finally turned to purple and a dark tint spread over the swampland. Night was falling, giving him the excuse he needed to close his eyes and escape the fresh recollections. As he closed his eyes, he almost thought that he heard someone whisper his name.

*

Even with the guidance of the charm, weeks went by without any signs of their escape. The thick marsh went on endlessly, nothing but muggy water and relentless insects buzzing around their faces to keep them company. Without much else to do, they continued their pattern of walking during the day and then finding whatever dry spots they could for the nights. If Sam had been sick of water before, Castiel could only imagine how the human felt about the substance now.

Despite how the days dragged on and on, the conversation flowed more smoothly between the two with Sam asking the angel whatever questions popped up into his mind about his angelic occupation, occasionally absentmindedly going off on a tangent whenever he remembered something new about his past. Castiel found it endearing how interested the other was in what he did, even after hearing about his failure. Sam loved asking Cas about what life was like in the beginning, what humans were like in the beginning, why things were the way they were, and how amazing it was for Cas to witness all the different eras of civilization. He didn’t always have the answers to the curious human, but trying to share as much of his knowledge as he could kept him entertained through the days that never seemed to end.

“I gotta ask you, it’s been bugging at me for a while now,” Sam began after hearing Cas’s firsthand account of the middle ages and the actual King Arthur, or at least the guy that inspired the tales. “Why are you dressed up like this? Did you choose this form on your own or did someone assign it to you? It just seems. . . strange.”

“On Earth and in Hell, it’s easiest for an angel to travel around in a vessel,” Cas said. “A vessel is just a human that grants an angel permission to enter them, unlike when demons possess humans. Jimmy’s been my vessel for a long time, around fifteen years ago he first said yes. He worked with a radio station, selling time for advertisements. He was a devout man, very eager to serve Heaven when I first approached him.”

“Wait, is he in there now? Just watching us?”

Cas shook his head. “The first time I possessed him was only for around four years. I could feel that he missed his family, and it bothered me to keep him away from a chance at life. I came back to him a few years later when he got into a car accident. I knew he wasn’t going to make it, so I asked him again, so that once he passed I would have an empty vessel. I thought it would be better that way after I saw how much it affected Jimmy not being able to be with the ones he loved. I felt almost as if whenever I held a vessel, I was holding the soul hostage within me. Understanding this, Jimmy let me use his body as he passed on. All he asked was that I fake his death long enough for them to bury me, so that his wife and his daughter could have a sense of closure unlike the first time he disappeared from them. Jimmy is up in Heaven now, sometimes I check up on him. He was my favorite vessel—he was a good man with good intentions.”

“What do you actually look like then? You know, your true form or whatever.”

“It would be hard for me to describe my true form in a way that you could comprehend, and if I attempted to show it to you in person, my very sight would overwhelm you and burn your eyes completely. But, I suppose the closest thing to describe it you would be if you could imagine a star shrunken down to the size of a sky scraper.”

Sam’s eyes widened as he looked over Castiel’s vessel a couple of times. “Wow. I thought I was the tall one of the two of us.”

For the first time in centuries, Castiel let out a laugh. It was a small noise, but the other still heard it and began to laugh along with him for the moment. That familiar pang struck at the angel’s chest as he heard the musical sound of Sam’s laughter, and he had to bury it down once again.

“That thing doesn’t have any indication of how far this damn portal is, does it? It’s been over two weeks,” said Sam, looking over to the charm around the angel’s neck.

Cas shook his head as he touched the amulet that still pointed ahead of them. A nagging voice in the back of his head insisted that this was a sign that the thing was just a trick, a way to keep them stuck in this dimension forever, and that the fact that it had helped him find the portal in the last realm had been all due to strange luck. Why would anyone in Hell be trying to help him get out? He was afraid to voice this fear to Sam, not wanting to let the human down by admitting another failure.

They continued on long past the time when the swamp became too dark to navigate, unable to find a dry land for hours. Cas saw Sam’s eyelids beginning to droop over his eyes, how his feet dragged through the mossy pond.

“It’s getting late, I don’t know if we’ll be able to find a dry spot tonight,” Cas said. He stopped in his tracks, looking around at his surroundings for another idea. Nothing came to his mind that could keep Sam dry.

“It’s fine, Cas. I can keep walking.”

“Are you sure? I could carry you again.”

“No, it’s fine.”

Despite how absolutely exhausted Sam looked, he kept on trucking through the dirty water. He grew slower as the night persisted, yet still would not stop to pause or rest even as the sun began to rise and give light to the swamp again. Through the next day, Sam kept on, even without a single minute of sleep.

Castiel began to worry about his human companion until halfway through the day when they finally came across a thin strip of dry earth. Sam looked like a child on Christmas day running over toward the land barely large enough to fit a man of his size. In fact, he had to curl up in a fetal position just to prevent his feet from dangling off into the water.

“Thank God,” he sighed, falling asleep almost immediately after speaking.

Castiel had to admit that it was pleasant getting a break from wrestling his way through the dense bog, even if he didn’t require sleep like his snoring companion. He just prayed to his absent father that they arrived at the portal soon. Even for an immortal like himself, the time down in Hell passed by so sluggishly. He ached for the ability to fly once again or even to just be able to freely teleport. Traveling by foot was becoming so tedious to the angel that could normally zap himself to the other side of the planet within seconds.

Since Sam took up most of the dry spot, Castiel still stood in the water, leaning against a thicker tree only a couple feet away. Being wet didn’t affect him in the same way that it affected the human. He felt and saw every individual particle of the water just as he felt and saw every individual particle of the air. The only difference in the water really was how the particles traveled closer together. The sensation of being wet wasn’t as irksome to him as Sam with how he could sense everything around him.

As he kept watch he caught sight of a black bird flying by up above them. Just as soon as it appeared, it disappeared into the thick brush of the tree tops.

A moment later, Castiel sensed something swim past his feet. This was strange: the whole time they’d traveled through the swamp, they hadn’t spotted any fish or other aquatic life. Looking down into the dirty water of the marsh, he saw the shadow of the animal zip ahead of him. Curious, he followed the creature on its path, wanting to find out why exactly he was just now coming in contact with it. He only followed it for a few minutes before he found himself lost suddenly, seeing no sign of Sam in any direction. The swamp grew darker as night fell quickly around Cas. Hadn’t the sun just been up a moment ago?

“ _Castiel_ ,” a soft voice whispered, sounding both distant and close at the same time.

The angel kept moving forward, trying to find a sign of Sam or the shadow in the pond that had disappeared. In his attempt, he wandered off into a clearing in the marsh. The ground was still covered in shallow water, but it was a large circle with absolutely no trees inside of it. Looking above at the night sky that for the first time was exposed, he saw a large, yellow full moon grinning down at him.

“ _Castiel. Castiel._ ”

Standing in the center of the clearing, the voice sounded like it came from every direction, encircling and trapping the angel.

Cas pulled out his blade, searching frantically for the source of the voice. “Where are you? Show yourself.”

“ _Castiel, why didn’t you save me?_ ”

His grip on the blade tightened when the whisper became more distinct. The voice was familiar, but there was no way that it could be her. He had seen the grace burn out of her as the demon stabbed her with her own blade. This was a trick from the swamp.

“ _Brother, please_.”

A hand grabbed at his ankle, dragging him down into the water. As he looked down at the pool below, he saw Hannah’s face staring up at him. He saw the vessel she had been in when she died; Caroline’s fierce blue eyes glowed like sapphires in the moonlight, her fair skin looking ghostly. That was one of the things about Jimmy that always drew in Cas, the way that his intense blue eyes reminded him so much of Hannah’s last vessel.

It wasn’t her, it couldn’t be her. The image staring up at him was a mere illusion trying to drag him down and trap him. He kicked helplessly at whatever held his ankle down and kept pulling him further. Even slashing down at the image in the water with his own blade didn’t seem to release the ghoul’s hold.

“ _Castiel, don’t leave me. Please, brother._ ”

It didn’t look like he could find his way out on his own. The only way to break free would be to use up more of his precious power that would be necessary to keep healing Sam and get them through to the gates of Hell. He needed to conserve it more carefully, but if he didn’t use it now he might not be able to free Sam at all.

He wouldn’t fail again. Looking down at the image of his dead sister only worked to strengthen that resolve. He wouldn’t let himself let Sam down the way that he had let down Hannah.

“ _Castiel, don’t leave me. Don’t you leave me again._ ”

“I’m sorry for everything,” he whispered back. Even knowing the illusion was fake, even knowing that he wasn’t talking to the real Hannah, even knowing that she was long dead, the thought of leaving her there in the water tore at his insides. He wanted to stay, to let himself be pulled in and punished for letting her die, but he had another to save. In saving Sam, he could start to forgive himself for what had happened to Hannah, his second-in-command, his sister. He couldn’t do anything else to bring her back, but he could complete his current mission and make up for his past.

“ _Brother, I love you_.”

Closing his eyes, he focused his energy to send a burst of light all around him in the clearing. When he opened his eyes, the hand was gone and he was back where he started beside the patch of dry land. Only he didn’t see Sam anywhere.

*

Castiel was gone when Sam woke up, his first red flag that something was wrong. He got up quickly, looking around through the wall of vegetation surrounding him.

“Cas? Cas, where are you?” he called out to no response. As he looked around for his guardian, a black bird flew above his head through the tangled tree tops. He thought back to the first day in the swamp when he’d seen a bird that looked just like that one zooming past.

He hopped down into the pond, starting to walk around in search of any sign of the dressed up angel. Repeatedly, he called out the angel’s name, but still no sign. While walking along in his search, he felt a sudden shudder rip through him as something slimy touched up against his bare foot. Sam looked down into the water, seeing the shadow of a fish swim past him. With nothing else to go by, he began to follow the fish as it lead him through the trees. The swamp became dark suddenly, almost as if night had fallen without any sort of transition from day. The fish led Sam into a thick bundle of trees before vanishing from the water.

“C-Cas?”

A vine from one of the trees fell down and wrapped around his waist, pinning him back against the tree behind him.

“ _Sam_.”

He writhed around against the harsh, damp bark at his back, but the vine only tightened at his struggle.

“ _Sam, why didn’t you save me?_ ”

A figure rose up from the water in front of Sam. It was Meg, but it was . . . not Meg. This girl had longer, darker hair and a morose look in her eyes that was uncharacteristic of the demon that had tortured him for so long. She looked drained and tired, as if she had never slept a day in her short life. And in the dark moonlight, she looked ghostly pale.

“ _You don’t even remember me, do you?_ ”

Sam shook his head, making the sadness in the figure’s eyes grow. Stalking over toward him, she touched his cheek and then it came back to him.

He remembered the first time he had met Meg while he was alive. How he’d abandoned his brother and come across her on his own, how the demon inside her had played the sweet girl at first. He remembered how fragile he was after his fiancée’s death, and how he almost began to fall for the sweet girl act. He remembered running into her again at the bus station on his way to California, running into her again in Chicago at the bar, and seeing her in that warehouse only to find out what she truly was. The girl that kept showing up in his life was really a demon that worked for Azazel, the demon that killed his mother. He remembered her tricking them and capturing him and his brother, and he remembered finally exorcising her only to be trapped in Hell with her once he got shipped downward. The sick irony.

Then he remembered the dying girl after the demon had been exorcised. How the only thing keeping her alive after the injuries she sustained while possessed was the demon itself. He remembered the guilt he felt after realizing they had done this to her. They had attacked and thrown the demon out a window with a living girl still attached.

“ _You could have saved me. You could have stopped her long before when you first had the chance. You’re supposed to save people. Why not me?_ ”

“I-I’m sorry,” Sam murmured, still thrashing around in the hold of the vines. Two more came to wrap around each of his wrists, pinning them back behind the tree at an uncomfortable angle.

“ _You could have saved me, Sam. Why did you do this to me?_ ”

Biting his lips, he prayed silently for the angel, hoping that somehow he could reach him. It was useless, but it was all he could do while trapped like this.

“ _Sam, please_.”

The vines began to tug the man down towards the water, but before his head went under, strong hands were pulling him free. The vines and the figure faded away as he was physically dragged from the enchantment and set back down onto dry land. His heartbeat was still racing in his ears as he stared up toward the green canopy.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t get to you sooner,” Cas said after a long pause. “I saw one, too.”

“I let her die. I killed her,” Sam whispered to himself. He could feel the sting he hadn’t felt in decades as tears begged at his eyes to fall. Today, he didn’t have the will to keep them back anymore.

Castiel watched the human for a few moments, debating what to do before approaching him carefully, wrapping his arms around the other. Being pressed against the angel, Sam noticed something strange about the purple charm—it was pointed upward. As he pulled back and looked up, he saw the black bird again, circling above them.

“Hold on to me,” Cas instructed. Sam tightened the embrace as the other reached up above them to grab the bird. He yanked harshly at the dark, feathery wing. Both of the travelers heard the screams of different women before they were transported to the next level.


	5. She's Not There

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He could hear the sounds of life all around, the chirping of birds flying overheard, the buzzing of bumble bees traveling from flower to flower, and the tiny ants crawling around in the dirt below. Ahead, he saw a young, gray rabbit hopping along into a rosebush. 
> 
> “Disgusting,” Crowley grumbled.

“ _Well, let me tell you about the way she looked_  
_The way she acts and the color of her hair._  
_Her voice was soft and cool,_  
_Her eyes were clear and bright,_  
_But she's not there._ ”  
— **”She’s Not There” by The Zombies**  


“Don’t you just love how the sun feels against your face, Sam?”

Lying on the downy grass, Sam gazed over towards Jess. In the light of the day, she was so beautiful, more beautiful than anything he had ever seen in his entire life. The sunlight radiated off her lightly tanned skin, her wavy blonde hair looking almost like the sun’s rays as it spread around her head in the grass. Lively gray eyes looked into his loving hazel ones, and he closed the distance between them with a chaste kiss before resting back down and closing his eyes. The sunlight kissed him all over on his exposed skin as Jess’s velvet soft hand grabbed his, squeezing it gently. If he never moved again, he would be content just becoming a part of the meadow.

“I do. I really do.” 

The couple had been sitting out on the grass for hours now, drifting in and out of sleep together while just letting the light of the day wash over. Sam never thought he was one for meditation, but on days like this with Jess beside him, he let his eyes close and allowed himself to be lost within his own thoughts. Never before had he felt so welcome in his own head.

“Do you remember when we went to the beach freshman year?” she asked, stretching her long, golden arms out in the grass. “You got burned from laying out so long in the sun. You said it was the first time you’d been in the Pacific Ocean when we waded through the salt water.”

With a chuckle, he nodded. “I do. You thought I was some weird farm boy when I said I was from Kansas.”

“I never said that!”

“I could see it in your eyes. Full of judgement at how uncultured I was when I kept choking on salt water,” he teased.

“You’re silly,” she rebutted. “Do you remember when we went back there our last year? You got all our friends together in on a plan to fake this big trip out to the beach. You insisted on going for a late night stroll on the beach just so you could propose after the end of the day.”

“I may be a farm boy, but I did have some ‘big-city’ romance in me.”

Jess smiled, but a strange gleam came from her eyes. “You were never a farm boy, Sam.”

Sam stared at her for a couple seconds longer before deciding that he hadn’t seen anything. Must just be a trick of the light, or maybe he’s seeing things. The man looked up at the clouds drifting above him, how serene they looked. How long had it been since he’d been able to watch the clouds? He amused himself for a few minutes by looking at the shapes he saw in the white fluff, just like he used to do when he was a little boy hiding out at the park before dad found him and insisted they had to go home. His father would always reprimand his older brother for him going missing, which Sam always felt guilty for since each time it was 100% his fault. He wondered if his father blamed his brother when Sam ditched them to go to Stanford, just like he blamed him for Sammy ditching them at the park.

If his father were alive now, would he blame his brother for him being here, too?

He lost track of the negative thoughts regarding where exactly “here” was as he put shapes to the marshmallow clouds. The smaller puff floating right above the happy couple looked like a poodle puppy chasing after something. No, it wasn’t quite a poodle, that was just the clouds making it look fluffier than the shape alluded to. It was definitely a hound dog the more he looked at it. To the left of the dog, Sam spotted a wider set of clouds that looked almost like a pair of angel wings.

“I wish it could just always be like this,” Sam murmured after the long silence, looking away from the wings. Something about them made him feel strangely sad.

With a smile brighter than the sun above, Jess looked over at her love. “Who is to say that it can’t be? Stay here with me. We can be happy together finally.”

Sam knew he couldn’t stay, even if he couldn’t remember the reason right now. He knew that there was something he had to do, someone he had to meet with outside. He lost the person in the meadow before. When was that? His mind wanted to say it had been days, but he felt like he’d been here with Jess for months. After all, if it were just days, why couldn’t he picture this man that was supposed to take him home?

“If you leave, how will I ever see you again?”

“I have to. I really do, I really have to—”

“Don’t you remember what happened the last time you left?”

Before he could protest any further, the meadow around him began to change color and form. The luster of the scene faded into more subdued hues as four walls popped up around him. Instead of laying in the grass, Sam was atop a hand-me-down mattress they acquired from Jess’s oldest brother. He recognized the room immediately as their apartment back in Stanford. He just arrived after going out on the hunt with his brother, the first hunt since he ran away from home to become a lawyer. Unlike every other night Sam crawled in to their bed, Jess was not laying on her side waiting for him. A drop of blood landed on his face from above before he turned his gaze up to the ceiling, seeing his fiancée pinned to it. A scarlet stain spread across her white nightie before the ceiling caught fire. Gray eyes staring down at Sam, fire consumed her, just like his mother two decades before.

Sam screamed.

In the blink of an eye, he was back in the bright field, surrounded by flowers.

“Are you going to leave me again, Sam?” Jess asked in a peculiar tone.

“No. No, never again.”

*

Castiel didn’t know how he lost Sam. He had been holding on as tightly as possible to the human when they entered the portal, but as soon as he landed in the new layer, Sam was gone. All he could see for miles and miles were flat plains. The sky appeared permanently gray and cloudy, almost as if it were on the verge of a storm, but the rain never began to fall. Gray faded into night, and night faded back into gray while Castiel trekked on through the high grasses, not a soul nor demon in sight. He used the charm around his neck as a form of navigation, even though he feared Sam might be far away from the next gate.

A nagging voice that grew louder with every mile told him that he had failed. Sam may not have made it through to this layer, and there was no way for him to travel backward now. Just like Hannah, he had failed Sam and in doing so, failed Heaven and failed Michael. Sam would be found and sent back into the pit by a creature just like they had come across in the tundra. The demons would find new ways of breaking the poor man until Sam gave in to temptation and put another soul on the rack. Sam would become a demon, a vile creature just like the rest, and the first seal of Lucifer’s cage would be broken. The Apocalypse would arise, and all of it would be Castiel’s fault. 

The most horrid of all these thoughts was that of Sam being broken. Through the exterior of his form, Cas could see how pure his soul was. Damaged from his time down here, yes, but not damaged beyond repair. Not yet. Imagining that light dimmed to something black and twisted into something ugly and cruel made his insides ache. He could picture those luminous hazel eyes turning to the color of coal. The boy who had sold his soul to save his brother, the boy that had gone forty years without succumbing to Hell, the boy that stirred up something strange within Castiel, manipulated into becoming a demon, a mutated shadow of a being. And it would all be entirely Castiel’s fault. 

The angel prayed that he would be struck down. That as soon as he reached surface without the boy, Michael and Raphael would descend from the Heavens and smite him. He didn’t doubt that they would for his unforgivable crimes. 

Maybe they would send another angel in time. He was not the first of his brothers sent down to recover Sam, even if he was the first to reach him. Cas fell short on the mission, but there was a strong chance another angel could rescue Sam in time. Even if Castiel wouldn’t be around to witness it.

Castiel tried to push all these negative thoughts out of his mind. It didn’t matter either way because he was not going to leave this realm without Sam. If that meant being stranded on this layer of Hell forever, so be it. If it meant jumping straight back down into the pit, so be it. The angel would rather fall on his own blade before he admitted to another failure. 

With how similar the surrounding seemed, it was difficult for Castiel to know where he had and hadn’t been. A part of him wondered if this layer were circular like the Earth itself, and that if he walked long enough he would only end up back to where he started. Another part of him wondered if the plains were infinite and that he could amble through the flat land for the rest of existence without finding anything at all but sky and ground. In the end, what would be the difference between the two? How could he ever tell with absolutely nothing of significance in his path?

Night fell once again. Castiel missed the curious questions Sam would pose during the journey. He admitted it was nice being able to travel continuously without the human’s need for sleep every night, but without the companionship and the conversation, Castiel felt absolutely alone in the empty world. A wolf howled in the distance, but Cas could not locate it anywhere on the horizons. Strange.

More hours of nothingness passed by before he finally caught sight of something in front of him. A shadowy figure on top of a slight incline in the land—not quite a hill but higher than the rest of the plain he’d seen so far. 

The pendant around his neck began to warm up the closer he got until it began to burn white hot. The heat seared through the angel, making him collapse onto his knees as he clawed at his neck to try to remove the charm, though it looked as if it were fused completely with the skin of his vessel’s chest. Groaning on the ground, Cas couldn’t convince his legs to move as the shadowy figure drew closer. His better instincts had been right—this charm must be a trap. It lead him and Sam astray until he’d completely lost the righteous man, and now some demon was going to get the better of him because of his naivety. It served him right for trusting dark magic at a time like this. Castiel, the most foolish of all the angel’s, meeting his end in the middle of Hell. It was fitting. 

As the figure drew closer, Cas could start to make out its features. The demon was a short, stout man with closely trimmed brown-black hair and a thin layer of facial hair around his mouth and up his cheeks. He was dressed entirely in black—black trousers, black shirt, black suit, all topped off with a silver tie. His true form was as contorted and dark as any other demon apart from its red lining—an indication that unlike most of the twisted souls in Hell, he was one of the crossroads demons. He thought back to the signature at the bottom of the note. 

_XOXO_

_The King of the Crossroads_

Perhaps this demon worked for this supposed “King” and was here to collect his prisoner. 

The creature stopped a few yards ahead of Castiel. It smiled down at where the angel was positioned before speaking in a low, accented tone. “Nothing more thrilling than being welcomed by a well-dressed man on his knees.” With a snap of his finger, the flame sensations from the amulet halted and Cas was able to stand up once more.

As soon as he stood up, he withdrew the blade and pounced at the demon. Immediately the pain from the charm returned momentarily, enough to toss him back before he could assault the demon.

“You angels are always so impolite, do you know that? After all I’ve done for you, all the charity work I’ve clocked in to help you on your last crusade—and this is how you greet me? You’re like winged barbarians.”

“What did you do with Sam?” Cas growled, still holding out his blade.

“Tall, dark, and handsome? Nothing. In fact, that’s what I’m here to talk with you about,” the demon said, pacing around Castiel. “You know, you out to wear more purple jewelry. Goes well with your eyes.”

“I don’t believe you.”

The villain scoffed. “Kings don’t lie. I don’t need to. Besides, I’m just as invested in your boyfriend as you are, Castiel.”

The angel braced slightly at the mention of his name. “You expect me to believe you are this ‘King’ character?”

It nodded. “The name’s Crowley, not that you were kind enough to ask. I’m the rightful King of the Crossroads, though lately someone’s been trying to steal all my glory.” He stopped circling Castiel for a moment. 

“Aren’t you a little short to be a king?”

Crowley crossed his arms. “This coming from an angel who looks like he should be doing my taxes,” he retorted. “Besides, with the intel I have on you, Cassie, I think I know which one of us is less equipped for our jobs, but that is not the point.”

The only thing keeping Castiel from attempting to attack Crowley again was the knowledge that the amulet was still around his neck and would burn him before he got the chance. 

“Why should I believe that you are helping us? Do you take me as a fool?” After speaking, Castiel realized that probably was not the best argument to use when he was the one who had been foolish enough to grab the cursed object in the start.

Judging by his amused expression, the angel could sense the same thought went through Crowley’s mind, but the demon did not point out the flaw in his logic. “When you’ve got thousands of crossroads demons under your command, you hear a lot of juicy gossip. I know that your good pal, Lilith, has been influencing my followers and trying to steal my contracts these past few years. Had it been entirely in my power, Sam Winchester would have never gotten a contract with anyone. I don't like to make deals with hunters, they bother my children and they’re just a nuisance for the most part. But I knew Lilith had that hots for your boyfriend, and she swayed one of my girls to play ‘Deal or No Deal’ with him. I know why she’s collecting souls, and I know why she wanted a playdate with that hunter in particular. Daddy’s girl wants to kick start the Apocalypse on us, and she’s recruited quite a lot of Hell’s worst in this scheme. As far as she knows, I’m playing ball as well, turning my back to all the games she’s been playing with my little ones.”

“Are you trying to say you’re not?”

“Precisely.” Crowley held his hands behind his back as he kept pacing. “See, I’ve read all the demon tabloids, and I know a little more about Lucy than the average footman. If there is one thing that Daddy Devil hates more than humans it’s demons, which are just the bastardized versions of the original bastards Grandpa God put together in the Garden. He wants to destroy everything and everyone: Heaven, Earth, Hell, and—most important of them all— _my_ thriving business. Once Lucifer wins the amazing race, he’ll be making shish kabobs of both humans and demons. As a man that profits on human stupidity and also my own existence, you can see where I might have a problem with that particular strategy. I have worked far too long and hard—pun intended—to get to the position I am at. I started from the very bottom of this food chain making a deal myself, then going to Hell, then becoming the dashing man I am today, then eventually killing off the previous leader of the crossroads demons until they had to heed to me. I’m not letting Lilith rain on my parade by turning our twosome into a threesome.” The demon stopped right in front of Castiel, dark eyes staring through the angel. “I don’t like to share.”

Castiel knew that demon society was far from being advanced, but he never realized before that any of the demons would not be completely loyal to Lucifer. He always assumed freewill to be entirely a human trait, though to be fair, demons did come from human souls. Maybe some traits stuck along during the transformation into these inferior creatures.

“You can fuss about it, pull the holier-than-thou act, and continue staring at me with that constipated look, Castiel, but I don’t want Heaven’s poster boy loitering around Hell any more than you do. I don’t want to be working with a punk angel any more than you want to be working with someone so blindingly handsome, but the enemy of my enemy is my begrudging ally for the time being until we get Anastasia out of Russia. So, what do you say, bird boy? Truce?”

The demon extended his hand. 

“If you harm Sam Winchester—”

“Yes, yes, I know. You’ll smite me with your holy voodoo magic tricks. Now, do we have an agreement or do you want to keep wandering through the grass until you reach Oregon?”

They shared a long look before Castiel took his hand. With another snap of his finger, the land around them changed.

*

The world around Castiel was nothing like the monotonous plain he’d been walking through the past few days. Everything was consumed in vibrant colors from the baby blue sky above to the vivid yellow wildflowers popping up from the grassy ground below. For miles, the land seemed to roll up and down in gentle hills, patches of trees and other plant life along with more flowers creating a more distinct setting than before. He could hear the sounds of life all around, the chirping of birds flying overheard, the buzzing of bumble bees traveling from flower to flower, and the tiny ants crawling around in the dirt below. Ahead, he saw a young, gray rabbit hopping along into a rosebush. 

“Disgusting,” Crowley grumbled. “Come on, let’s find Waldo.”

The angel wanted to ask who exactly Waldo was but decided against it as he followed Crowley forward. “How do you know where he is?”

“Being a demon adept at traveling to and from Earth, you get good at navigating the maze. This layer is specifically designed to filter out higher things like you. Think of it as a really, really big net. You got caught in the never-ending walk of shame while your friend slipped through the cracks and landed in Disneyland. Only, this Disneyland wants to guilt trip its guests into staying trapped here forever.”

Castiel grimaced at that thought. 

“He shouldn’t be too far from here. This part is just a huge circle. The mortal souls are always drawn right to its center. Makes it easier for the hounds to catch up with them after long enough.” They lumbered up one of the taller hills, and by the time that they reached its highest point, Castiel could see two people off in the distance. “Speaking of hounds, I apologize for the ones that you ran in to a few layers back. Those weren’t mine. Mine are far better trained than that. Lily’s been dipping in the doggy reserve as well.”

The pair in the distance didn’t seem to see the angel and the demon approaching them, despite being faced toward them. Even from so far away, Cas could make out Sam’s shape, relief crashing into him like a wave.

“Can they see us?” Castiel asked.

“Not this far away, no. They’re in a sort of bubble out there. They won’t be able to see us until we’re right there in front of them.”

“How do we get him out of it?”

“Just follow my lead.”

Crowley’s lead turned out to be heading down the hill, toward the invisible “bubble” straight on without any apparent plan. Cas withdrew his blade once again, looking extremely hypervigilant next to the demon’s nonchalance. Just as they were around twenty feet in front of the unaware human, Crowley placed his hand on Castiel’s chest, signaling for him to stop.

“I wouldn’t go barging in there so quickly, it will only try to repel you. Stand still.” Crowley reached into his jacket and pulled out a gray dagger of his own. He pressed it forward to where Castiel assumed the bubble began, and the tip of the dagger began to sizzle, leaving a black spot in the air. The demon used the dagger to start drawing a strange symbol in the air. The symbol was in a bizarre, hellish language he didn’t comprehend, but once Crowley appeared to finish the last curve, the whole thing disappeared entirely. “All right, team. You’ve got fifteen minutes to go in there and retrieve your boy.”

“You’re not coming with me?”

“The symbol can only carry in one of us. I doubt me alone will be able to convince your boyfriend to come back to the party. Keep an eye out for any rabbits.” Crowley took a step back. “Don’t worry, you’ll see me around. I’m sure you blokes will need me to weasel you out of another trap later.”

Before Castiel could say anything else to the demon, he vanished in a cloud of dark red smoke. 

With nothing left to do, the angel advanced forward. He didn’t see where exactly the bubble began, but he could tell the moment he was in there because both the people within turned their heads to look at him. Cas saw something peculiar in Sam’s gaze—something frightened at the sight of him, almost like it didn’t recognize him. He eased up on his pace before speaking. “Sam, it’s all right. It’s me. I’m here to help you out.”

Sam and the woman beside him both stood up, holding onto each other with the same growing look of fear. The man positioned himself in front of the illusion of the woman, as if he were trying to protect her from Castiel. “Who are you? Stand back, don’t come any closer,” he warned.

As an angel, Castiel was more than used to the look of fear in human eyes at the sight of him. His presence could be intimidating to any mortal, and more often than not mortals usually took angel visits as a bad sign. Even with this past, seeing Sam—the man that had been so trusting of Castiel, the man that had not looked at him any differently for what he had done long ago—with that intense fright in his eyes was too much for the angel.

“Castiel. I’m the angel that saved you from Hell.”

“Sam, what is he talking about?” the woman behind the tall man asked. 

“I don’t know.” The second part was meant to be a whisper, but Castiel’s angelic hearing could still catch it. “Just stay behind me, Jess.”

Castiel took another step toward the two. “You know this isn’t where you’re supposed to be. You must know that deep down, this is just another trap. I’m the one here to take you back to your family, to your life. You real life.”

“Jess is my family,” Sam replied, glaring down the angel before taking a step back. “I’m not going anywhere. I won’t leave her again.”

“Sam, that’s not Jess. Don’t you remember anything from Hell?”

The man faltered for a second before glancing back at Jess. “You’re lying. You’re no angel. You’re trying to take me away from her.”

“Look at me, Sam,” Castiel commanded. “I raised you from perdition. You were being tortured by a demon named Meg in the pit for decades. I came to you and brought you out. We traveled through several layers of Hell—a layer of fire, a layer of ice, a layer of swampland, and now this. You are the righteous man of Heaven’s prophecies, the only thing capable of preventing the Apocalypse. Just think on it, you’ll remember it.”

Sam shook his head, stepping back further. Jess moved now to stand in front, eyes blinking black as she stared down the angel.

“Leave us. Now,” she growled in a voice different from before.

“You sold your soul a year ago because your brother died. Do you remember that?”

“I—” Sam started to speak before the illusion of “Jess” ran at Castiel.

Whatever this creature was, its paranormal strength outmatched that of the angel, pinning him down to the grass. The ground began to shake beneath them, the pretty blue skies fading to red. Cas tried to push her off, even just enough so that he could get a good grip on his blade before she snatched it from his hands. 

“No one is going to take Sam away from me,” she hissed.

The thing slashed Castiel on the cheek with his own blade, grinning in sick delight at how the wound glowed a dim blue.

“Jess, what the hell are you doing?” Sam demanded, walking up behind her and staring down at the angel below. He tried to pull her off of him, but with just a quick flick of her hand, he fell to the ground.

“Now, where were we?” the black-eyed creature asked, slicing another line down the opposite cheek. Without breaking the skin again, she trailed the tip of the blade from his jaw down his neck and then down to the middle of his chest. Castiel went stiff, trying to summon up any of his powers to stop the Hell spawn, only to discover that whatever forces were holding Sam in here were also blocking off his grace. The tip of the angel blade pierced in through his chest just a half of a centimeter before Cas caught view of Sam standing up again out of the corner of his eye.

“Jess, stop!” he shouted. “Stop or I’ll leave.”

The creature looked back at Sam just long enough for Cas to knock the blade out of her hand, over toward the human. The former hunter reached down to pick it up, stalking toward the illusion of his dead fiancée. 

“You’re not Jess,” he said in a low voice. “This—this place isn’t real.”

“Sam, please, don’t do this. You’ve gone mad, this thing here—He’s not an angel. He’s driven you mad, and you need to listen to me,” Jess begged. 

“I’m done listening.”

Before the creature had the chance to stand up and face Sam, the hunter dug the blade into her core. Just like in his memories, a spot of red grew around the blade before the illusion burst into flames. The human jumped back, falling over his own feet as he tried to scramble away from the sight, but as soon as it had appeared, it was gone.

The sky above changed colors once more, turning from red to gray, and Castiel could practically feel his grace’s strength returning to him. All the flowers and the hills faded away along with the bright sun above. The fantasy world that Sam had been trapped in began to look just like the eternal flatlands that trapped Castiel before. The only thing that remained was a gray rabbit, hopping away from them.

Cas remembered something Crowley said before about rabbits. Looking down, the charm he wore pointed straight at it.

“Sam, we have to go,” Castiel said, scrambling up and grabbing onto Sam.

The man still appeared dazed and very confused while being carted along. “What the—”

“No time to explain. We have to follow that rabbit now.”

The little critter was far ahead now, but with enough insistent tugging on Sam, the two managed to stay on its metaphorical tail for about a mile. Cas had no idea what to expect, didn’t know if the bunny was leading them to the portal itself or if they would have to slaughter the adorable animal in order to open up the portal, but he stuck to the simple plan of following the rabbit until he found out. Eventually the tiny mammal vanished in front of them into what was the largest rabbit hole either had ever seen. Pulling on Sam, Cas jumped in to the hole right behind it.


	6. You'd Better Run

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam stared above his head at the ceiling of the cave while he waited for Cas to return. The minutes dragged on and on as he gradually caught his breath, even if his muscles were all completely useless for the time being.
> 
> During the chase, he could have sworn he heard someone shouting his name.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait. School started up again, and the first week has been super busy for me. Updates might be more sporadic, but I'll try to keep up with getting it posted in a timely fashion. In the mean time, I hope you enjoy this one it's one of my favorite chapters in this.
> 
> Warning for some violence in this chapter.

“ _You better make your face up in your favorite disguise,  
With your button down lips and your roller blind eyes,  
With your empty smile and your hungry heart.  
Feel the bile rising from your guilty past   
With your nerves in tatters.  
When the cockleshell shatters and the hammers batter   
Down the door  
You'd better run._”  
— **”Run Like Hell” by Pink Floyd**  


Sam’s vision was blurry for the first couple seconds after they landed. Everything was just a light shade of gray before he blinked away the leftover haze in his eyes to see how high he was up. Sitting near the edge of a rocky cliff, he was thousands of feet away from the blue lake glittering down below. A brisk breeze ruffled through his tangled hair and tickled at his face, sending a shiver down his spine while he got a sick feeling looking down from so high up. Slowly, he stood up, scared the rocks might give way and send him plummeting down off the cliff. He decided to try and keep his eyes straight ahead instead of gazing down any longer, his deep seeded fear of heights making the look down almost unbearable. All around him were vast mountain ranges, with their peaks stabbing at the clouds above. Behind him sat the angel, also coming to at about the same rate. 

All the mountains seemed so familiar, almost like he’d been here before a long, long time ago. Thinking harder, he remembered a time when his family had visited the Rocky Mountains on the way back from hunting a coven of inept witches out west. With no other hunts needing to be tended to at the time, their father decided the boys had to see one of the places he would travel to as a child. Sam remembered standing up near the top of one of the smaller mountains, wondering deep down if he stood on one of the tallest mountains he could peer into the clouds and see angels sitting on top of them. When he shared this thought with his brother, the other Winchester scoffed at him and said there was no such thing. 

Looking over at Castiel, Sam felt the irony.

The tall man took a small, sheepish step towards Cas. He remembered perfectly now what had happened just before, and he felt awful for all of it. He could have gotten the angel killed because he’d let himself get entangled in that mess. A rooky mistake for a guy like him.

“Look, Cas, I’m really sorry about . . . that.”

The angel approached him with the same uncertainty in his demeanor, though there was a forgiving smile on his face. “You don’t need to worry about it, Sam.” Just a few steps had brought Castiel almost right up to his face. His breath caught in his throat as he stared down at Cas, who had never been this close up to him before. Their faces were just inches apart, and they both lingered there for a couple excruciatingly long seconds. Sam had never noticed before how Cas just had the faintest brown stubble along his chin and above his pale lips, like a thin layer of dust. Part of him wanted to reach out and stroke over his cheeks, even though a more rational part of him thought that was a horrible idea. Before either side could win in the internal debate, the angel took a step back. “We should start looking for a pathway that we can take down.”

“Wait, um, Cas?”

The other paused in his tracks. “Yes?”

It was the single most awkward gesture in all of human history as Sam moved to wrap his arms around Castiel in a tight hug, mostly due to the fact that the angel had no idea how to respond for a good ten seconds before jerkily raising his arms to pat at Sam’s back. Even with how strange it appeared at first, after a couple seconds the pair settled into each other, both secretly enjoying the moment more than they’d ever like to say. After a few happy moments passed by, Sam pulled away, putting back on a face of composure. “Thank you for getting me out. And for everything. There’s no way I could ever even start to repair you for all of this.”

Cas gave a tender smile in return. “You’re welcome. You’re a good person, Sam. You’re worth saving.”

The last sentence struck a chord deep inside the hunter. Something within him had needed to hear that for a long time, especially after all the trials the pair had been through in the past weeks.The genuineness in Castiel’s voice made the man actually start to believe him. The way Cas looked at him, the tone of his voice, how he never seemed bothered by the need to save Sam—it all made the man actually believe he may be righteous.

Without another word, the duo embarked on one of the paths down the mountain together, following the direction the charm around Castiel’s neck indicated.

*

They slipped easily into their old routine—Sam finding more questions to pester the angel with, Castiel giving long winded, lecturing responses that the human appeared fascinated with, clinging to every word. Cas noticed, though, that Sam seemed to slip in more and more of his memories into the conversation. He was really coming to his senses now, nearly fully comprehensive of his old life. This was a good sign for two reasons: first, this meant that they were nearing the outer rings of Hell, and second, Sam looked so much happier whenever he realized he had another part of himself returned. Even if the memories were sad, a hint of relief glimmered in his eyes just at knowing about the sadness. The man was putting himself back together, piece by piece.

“I remember the first time I went hiking,” Sam began, almost of the blue when he woke up from the first night’s rest and began on their designated trail. “I don’t know why, but—the thought just hit me. I had an uncle that I would visit a lot when my dad thought I was too young to go on most of the hunts still. Wait, no, he wasn’t an uncle. Well, he was like an uncle, but no blood relation. He was just another hunter, apparently. My dad and my brother were on a case, and they dropped me off with my uncle—Bobby was his name—who had just wrapped up a case of his own. Close to his house was this really nice forest preserve. I’m sorry, am I boring you?”

Cas’s eyes were glued ahead, staying vigilant for anything as they wandered down the winding path to the bottom of the mountain. He stopped for a second to look back toward the speaker. “No, I enjoy hearing your story. Go on.”

Sam smiled before continuing. “I had never been in any woods before, but Bobby insisted that I should go out and get used to that kind of setting. Never would have realized when I was little and just figuring out that my family hunted monsters that I would spend so much time chasing down things in forests, but Bobby had enough sense to take me out for a nice walk one day. Create some memories of the place that wasn’t a life or death type of situation. It was so nice and calm. He told me stories about when he was a kid, how much better and worse it was simultaneously. Bobby was a really good guy, you know. He still is.” The smile dripped down slightly. “He wanted to kill me when he found out what I did to save my brother. Bobby was super protective of me in a way no one else really was, he was of both of us. I mean, it’s not to say my father wasn’t, but . . .”

He trailed off for a couple of long seconds. 

“Sam, what is it?” 

“I just, I just kind of remembered. I never saw it before, but I don’t think I really got along well with my dad. That’s why I—That was why I ran off and went to college. I didn’t just clash with my father—I _hated_ him for a good amount of my childhood. I hated him, and I didn’t want to be like him at all. Part of not wanting to be like him was wanting to not be a hunter.” He blinked, a distant look on his face as he tried to process this sudden realization. “I saw Bobby more as a father, and sometimes that’s what he was. He was the one that first got the idea in my head of going to college. I mean, there were teachers that always encouraged it, saying I had all this potential, but I remember one day when I was just a preteen and left behind on a more dangerous hunt. Bobby got tipsy and started telling me about his life before his wife died, and he took up the new lifestyle. Out of nowhere, he turned to me and asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up—what I actually wanted to be.

“The question really blindsided me. Never in my life had I thought that I could be anything but a hunter like my father and my brother before me. Without any other ideas in my mind, I told him I wanted to be a house owner, and he laughed his ass off for ten straight minutes. To be honest, I wasn’t lying. By the time I got into college, I had marinated in the thought enough that I decided to study law, but beneath it all what I really wanted was just stability. Being a lawyer seemed like a stable job, and I never heard of any lawyers that didn’t own their own house and had to move constantly. All the TV lawyers always had beautiful spouses and wonderful families, despite all the drama of their job. Sure, the idea of saving people and put away monsters in a more legal and safer way appealed to me, but nothing seemed better than the stability of it all. Bobby was the only one I told about applying to school. I used his name on all the forms, and we even made up excuses so that we could go on college visits together with him posing as my dad. Bobby really wanted to see me grow and succeed in ways my actual father never really did.” Sam looked down at his feet for a few silent seconds. “Sorry, I’m rambling. I kind of just opened a big can of worms on myself and kept going deeper.”

Hearing Sam “ramble” out about his past, about his actual feelings more so than just memories, was like seeing the tortured soul in the pit all over again. Sam was exposing this raw, unfiltered part of himself, even if was just because his words were racing out of his mouth.

Cas loved it.

“If it comforts you, I never really had much of a relationship with my Father,” Cas responded, gazing up at the puffy, gray clouds hanging above his head. “He left all of us a very long time ago, not long after He sent your ancestors out of the Garden for what they did.”

“God left?”

Castiel nodded. “He left the universe without a trace, leaving the archangels in charge to preside over the Earth. There’s a lot of speculation over why He abandoned us. Some say that it’s temporary and He will return to us one day in a beautiful new form and permanently save the world from all the dark creatures that dwell on Earth and in Hell, but many of my brethren just believe that after what Lucifer did to His creation and after He locked away His favorite angel, the Lord couldn’t bear to stay in our world any longer.” 

Behind them came the sound of something tumbling down the side of the mountain. They both turned at the same time to see what it was and found nothing there but a couple rocks falling to the ground not too far below.

“What do you think happened?”

Castiel thought for a couple long moments on how to answer this. He always wanted to accept that answer that Michael insisted upon, that the leave was temporary and all apart of some bigger plan that was going on. He always wanted to believe but still always had trouble doing so with all the pain and suffering he witnessed among humankind. With all the catastrophes the angels had to prevent on their own—including this Apocalypse—as well as all the times they had to sit back and let the world burn on its own, it was hard to believe that God still cared much about His greatest invention. Often times, he just thought perhaps God created for Himself a new universe, one that improved upon all the flaws he discovered in Earth and Heaven. One in which His most beloved son did not attempt to destroy His most valued creation.

“I think He’s gone. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me,” he answered honestly. “Still, I just hope that one day He will come back. Maybe it would be good for an Apocalypse to happen, just so that He would pay attention again. Realize that we need Him.”

Sam tried to mask a peculiar look of disappointment, though Cas could still see through it.

“Was this not an answer you were hoping for?” 

The righteous man shrugged, looking back up at the clouds. “I always wanted to believe there was something out there, someone looking out for all of us with a vested interest. I guess I just wanted to believe in a God, so it’s nice to know there is one, but the whole sentiment feels wrong.” He looked up towards the sky, where the gray clouds were looking darker than before. Maybe it would start to rain. “One of the schools I went to, I made a friend named Rachel who was very religious. I was about fifteen, and my dad didn’t think much of me hanging out with her a lot because he was convinced that she was my first girlfriend.” He rolled his eyes. “She invited me to go with her to her youth group every week, and since I never really had an extracurricular before, I went with her. The person that ran the group would talk about this forgiving father figure, one with this unconditional sense of love for all His creations. They’d talk about how God created all of us in His image, and it made me feel okay about wanting a different life. I wanted to believe in this Father who would love me no matter what I did, and that had a purpose for everything I was going through. It made things a lot easier thinking there was a higher power when I really got into hunting.”

“I’m sorry, Sam.”

He smiled over at the angel, though it was a bittersweet expression. “It’s fine. I guess me and father figures don’t do so well, anyway.” He wiped away at his forehead when the first rain drop hit him in the face. “And just when you think we’ve dealt with enough water. I thought Hell was supposed to be all fire and brimstone like before.”

Castiel chuckled. “Your Bible was written mostly by people who lived in hot climates. I don’t think they’d imagine water to be that awful. Though, the flood in Genesis should have been a fair warning.”

It began to rain in earnest as they neared level ground. The sky grew even darker, indicating that soon it would shift into a thunderstorm from the benign rainfall. There were no signs of any caves or covered areas, so trying to avoid the storm at this point was impossible. At least they could try to travel as far as possible on flat land where rain couldn’t cause them to have difficulty climbing up.

Cas saw Sam jump at the first deafening boom of thunder. It must have been so long since the man had heard that sound. Reaching out, he placed a caring hand up on Sam’s shoulder. Sam looked back with a small smile, raindrops coating his face and clinging to his eyelashes now. The man placed his hand over Castiel’s for a moment before the same boisterous sound echoed through their surroundings. 

They both lowered their hands as Sam sighed. “I hate that sound.”

The thunder continued as they marched on through the rain, though it began to sound a little peculiar once they passed the base of the nearest mountain. No, that sound couldn’t have been thunder, it sounded far too much like—

Something small and metal drove itself into Castiel’s shoulder, causing him to jolt forward before turning to look for the source of the bullet. It stung him far worse than any metal on Earth could have hurt him, but the pain faded after a few moments while he maneuvered himself in front of Sam, unable to find the shooter above them. Another shot, seemingly from another angle, struck Sam in the side, making him bite back a cry of pain. With no idea where the assailant was, Castiel just grabbed the hand of the man that was now doubled over, urging him back up so that they could begin to run.

*

Once they reached the small cave, Sam collapsed onto the ground, thoroughly exhausted. They had been running for at least an hour until they were sure that whatever was following them had either given up trying or lost them in their pursuit. After holding back for so long, he could finally let out a low groan at his aching muscles, the three bullets lodged into his side and back, and the immense pain in his feet. Propping himself up as slowly and gently as possible, he looked over at his feet were, as he had expected, cut up beyond repair from running on all the hard stone and rubble. Leading into the cave was a trail of bloody foot prints up to where he lay on the ground, a red pool forming by his feet. Too weak to get up and do anything about the clear trail, Sam turned his head toward Castiel, who in comparison looked as if he’d just jogged for five minutes. “C-Cas?”

The angel caught sight of the trail before even having to ask the question. “I’ll fix it up, then I’ll be back to help you.” He grimaced while looking over the soul, not having noticed in the pursuit how much it took a toll on Sam. “I’m sorry, I’ll be right back. I just need to be sure whatever that was won’t find us for a while.”

Sam stared above his head at the ceiling of the cave while he waited for Cas to return. The minutes dragged on and on as he gradually caught his breath, even if his muscles were all completely useless for the time being.

During the chase, he could have sworn he heard someone shouting his name. A voice so familiar, more familiar than any of the other voices or apparitions he’d encountered in the other layers of Hell. It was entirely possible another figure from his past was going to appear to torment him, but trying to match up the voice with a face grew to be so difficult the more he thought about it. No matter how hard he focused, he couldn’t even recall who ever called him “Sammy” back on Earth. Sometimes, Meg would use that name for him, but every time she did it almost seemed to have a specific purpose. Sammy felt as if it were an important name, even though that concept sounded weird as he sorted through his thoughts and memories. It also didn’t make sense. All the other apparitions were gentle and made him feel at ease while they tried to trap him. Even when he saw the figure of human Meg, the girl was trying to torture him in a more emotional way in the swamp, not this bizarre rat race through the mountains. Why the hell would this creature choose to chase him and Cas around with a gun?

At the sound of someone coming into the cave, Sam scrambled up quickly onto his protesting arms until he saw that it was his angel savior. He wasted no time to slump back down onto the ground while Castiel walked over to him, sitting down beside the tired man. 

“Hold still,” Cas murmured, placing his hand on Sam’s forehead. The power of the angel’s grace passed over him like a warm wave of ocean water, washing away all the pain and blood from the pursuit until it came to a halt right before his feet. The grace cleared up the slashed up surface, but his feet still ached as Cas pulled his hand away.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, “But I’m nearly out of power. I’m afraid if I do any more I will run out completely before we reach the gate.”

“It’s okay,” Sam replied, sitting up slowly. Hopefully if they didn’t have to run any more for a while, his feet could rest up for the next day. Besides, how many more layers could there be before they finally make it to the end? “Is there anything we can do to re-charge your battery?”

“Nothing that wouldn’t be terribly unpleasant for both of us. I think right now we both just need some rest.”

Sam nodded. He laid back down, figuring sleep would be the best thing he could do at the moment, but the whole chase left him feeling wide awake. It only took him about five minutes of staying still with his eyes closed before he gave up and sat back up. “I’m too awake still.”

“That’s fine. I don’t mind some more company.”

Smiling, the human looked over at his angel companion, getting caught up in his blue eyes for a couple moments. With his memories constantly returning to him, he was sure that he had never seen anyone with eyes so deeply blue as Castiel. Being this close and staring deep into them was always mesmerizing. Sam always had a weakness for light eyes, from the first girl he liked to Jess to the first boy he liked—not that he liked to get into that a lot. 

“Sam? Was there something you wanted to talk about?” Cas asked, interrupting his daydream. 

“No, sorry, I just got distracted,” Sam said in a tiny voice, averting his gaze.

When Cas responded, there was a strange amusement that the soul had never heard before. “You’re blushing.” The man looked back up toward him, seeing a strange expression on his usually stoic face. It left just as soon as it came, but the image of it clung in the back of Sam’s mind. 

This was ridiculous. Sam had simply spent too much time with Castiel and was seeing things that weren’t there. Of course he felt something for the angel—the guy had saved him, after all—but Sam was blowing all of this way out of proportion. Angels aren’t like humans. They’re basically holy robots being sent around on different missions all over the globe until the world finally ends. They don’t have any need for human emotions, and even if they did, as soon as the two made it home, Castiel would be gone forever. Who knows if they would even pull a _Men In Black_ memory erasing trick? Sam won’t just never see him again, he may never even know what happened or who Castiel was. 

Sam reluctantly pulled away, trying to create more space between himself and the angel. He was not about to lead himself down this dead-end road. 

But when Sam moved away, Cas leaned in just a bit closer, something strange passing through his eyes again. In the moment, he didn’t look like some mighty, avenging angel sent from Heaven that could obliterate him with the flick of a finger. He didn’t look like a gigantic ball of energy crafted by God Himself to do His dirty work. He didn’t look supernatural at all. He just looked like a man who felt just as lost in his own skin as Sam.

“Sam, are you okay?” Castiel spoke in a voice hardly louder than a whisper. “You look nervous.”

Nervous was nothing. Sam felt like every inch of his body was being tortured all over again. He felt worse than when Meg yanked out all the hair on his head, worse than when she ripped off each individual nail from his body, and even worse than when she fed him razors for another one of her “exciting” breakfasts. He rather be strapped down with a knife carving into his flesh than feeling this unexplainable emotional torment. That familiar nagging voice came back to tug at his brain: what if this wasn’t real? What if this was a super elaborate scheme Meg was pulling on him again? Maybe she’d found a way to get into his brain. It wasn’t impossible. She’d almost done it before, why not now?

The edges of his vision started to blur as his chest ached. He felt like something was grasped around his neck, choking him with its invisible hands. Maybe it was Meg. He was back in the pit. He was still there. He never left. Sam could almost feel his heart racing, pounding harder and harder like it was trying to spring right out from within his chest.

Almost distantly, he heard the angel spoke. “Sam? What’s going on?”

“I’m just—I just . . .” Placing together a comprehensible sentence was near impossible while Sam could hardly catch his breath from hyperventilating. The whole world felt like it was spinning around him. “I’m fine, I’m fine.”

He wanted to get up, to ignore his sore feet and the threat of danger outside and just run like hell. To where or from what exactly, he didn’t know, but he felt like something big and far more dangerous was coming after him. How would he ever escape Hell? He was too weak to even be able to save his own brother without selling off his soul. He deserved Hell. Everything Meg did to him, he deserved, including whatever she was doing to him now.

“Sam, you’re panicking,” Castiel said, placing his hands on the man to try and calm him down. Despite the contact, the angel felt miles away from Sam.

This had to be fake. All these supposed memories and these bizarre layers must be fake. He tried to think back to his mantra, the four lines he’d repeat to ward off these thoughts, but even those felt fake. He was not going to get out of here. He never helped anyone. He was not strong enough to be a hunter. Who cares what his name was? The only real things he had ever known were Meg and the room. How could anything ever exist outside of those four walls?

Sam came back down to a normal level after only a few minutes of the intense dread. While he could still hear the pounding in his ears, his heart beat began to decrease and the world around him didn’t feel so far away. He was still coming to when he felt the angel’s arms wrapping around him in a tight embrace. 

*

After Sam’s panic attack, they remained wrapped up in each other’s arms for the rest of the night. The human calmed down completely before drifting off to sleep. Cas, needing to keep watch and not wanting to seem too strange, kept his eyes glued in the direction of the opening, listening in for any sound coming from the outside. The night remained calm, though, not even the storms from the previous day coming to interrupt the serene music of the breeze pushing through the cracks between the mountains. Sam stayed sound asleep until the first rays of light seeped into the cave, signifying the start of another day in this layer. Rubbing at his eyes, he rose from the uncomfortable “bed” of the ground, groggy but somewhat ready for the new day. Castiel pulled away at the first sign of him getting up, instantly giving him any necessary distance. 

There was mostly silence between the two as they got up and began to head out. The charm pointed in a different direction than the night before, but with all the strange places that the portals have been, Castiel chose not to question it. 

Half the day passed by without any conversation or mysterious gunman chasing them down. Every time that Cas glanced over at his companion, the taller of the two men looked incredibly dejected, leaving the angel to worry about him. Perhaps there was something really wrong going on. Had Castiel made him uncomfortable? That was very likely. Maybe he was letting too much of his feelings show through and that had set off Sam the night prior. 

The sun began to set in the west, dipping down behind the structures behind them. The blue-gray sky faded to a light indigo that grew darker with each passing second. With all the mountains around them, night appeared to come so much faster since the stone peaks would block out the sun long before the horizon could get to it. Soon they would need to find another spot to set up camp as their source of light dwindled. They continued on as they always did, but with only Cas leading the search for a reasonable shelter since he did not want to interrupt the silence his companion had created. The angel discovered another cave in the distance when, for the first time all day, Sam spoke in a full, clear phrase. 

“I’m sorry about last night. I guess a lot of this is still registering in my brain,” he said, though the apology didn’t reach his eyes. The hazel orbs were still looking down at his bare feet which carefully maneuvered themselves as to not get scratched up and bleed over the earth again. 

Cas paused in his tracks, lightly grabbing Sam by the wrist just until he stopped. “You don’t need to apologize for that. You’re going through a lot of emotions. That is a perfectly normal response to being in Hell, being tortured, and then being dragged through all of this to get out.”

Sam bit down on his chapped, pink lips and pushed a stray strand of hair out of his face. “I know, I know.” He went silent again for a few seconds as Cas just stood still, waiting for whatever else the man had to say. “Some of the emotions might not exactly be acceptable, though, and I don’t know if it’s just the Hell buzz in my brain or some other deep-seated issue from when I was, well, alive.”

“What do you mean?”

Before Sam even got the chance to formulate an answer, the familiar boom of a shotgun blasting in their direction sounded out loud. Looking forward quickly, Cas caught sight of two distinct figures standing in the mouth of the cave, two tall man wearing a mixture of denim and leather and yielding two guns pointed at the duo. The violet charm around Cas’s neck pointed straight at them. Either they were protecting the portal or they were the portal. 

Sam stared with wide eyes at the two figures as they began to load up and fire another round at him. Cas yanked him back by the shoulder, making him barely miss a bullet that grazed past his ear. 

“Sam, stay behind me,” he commanded, but the man seemed too interested in staring at the men in the cave that were moving out to come closer. Cas yanked him back all the way behind him, pulling out the angel blade. If his idea was right and they were the next portal, that meant their best bet was not to keep running but to instead confront them. Charging at them would leave Sam here, too exposed for whatever they had planned, so all he could do at this point was brace himself and wait for them to come near. 

With each step they took towards the angel and the righteous man, the figures took more shots right at Castiel’s chest, their arsenal seemingly endless. Cas quickly lost count of the number of bullets wedged into his chest once they were only twenty or thirty feet in front of him. Each shot sent a jolt of pain through him, but nothing was enough to make him falter enough to not be able to stand his ground. After everything he’d been through in these past few months alone, two tough guys with guns didn’t scare him. 

The same could not be said for Sam, who stood trembling behind Castiel. 

Once the two stalked close enough, the older man with dark hair just like Sam’s and a brown and gray beard went to attack Castiel while the younger man with sandy hair and bright green eyes tried to move past him to get to Sam. Cas thought back to the Hellhounds in the second layer of Hell who had tried to separate the two in the same fashion. 

Castiel managed to swat the shotgun out of the older figure’s hands, wrestling with the creature. He slashed at him with the angel blade, but his prized weapon did no damage as it attempted to penetrate the shadow of a man. It went right through him like Cas was stabbing water instead of hard flesh. 

Behind him, Sam was trying to push away the man that had him tackled to the ground. From a far, the struggle looked scripted and rehearsed, as if Sam knew every move that the figure would try to use on him and vice versa. They looked far less like enemies struggling and far more like brothers. Then it clicked in Castiel’s head.

Sam had encountered his mother, his dead lover, and even the woman he couldn’t save. All figures that shaped who he was, stalking him through these layers along with the Hellhounds, the creatures that had killed him in the end. The only characters missing from his narrative were his brother that he’d died for and his father that sent him down this path in the first place. They wielded the guns because that was a hunter’s weapon of choice.

The gun.

Maybe the blade couldn’t hurt the figure resembling Sam’s father, but the gun might be able to do some damage. 

Castiel wormed his way out from the figure’s hold, dashing over toward the discarded shot gun. He felt the thing grab at his ankle, pulling his feet out from underneath him and sending him crashing down to the harsh ground. Kicking back with his trapped leg, Cas attempted to crawl forward using only the strength of his arms. With a sharp kick right to the creature’s nose, he managed to get his leg free and scramble over quickly to where the shotgun sat. He grabbed it, swiftly twirling around to where the fake man had risen. Just as he started to charge at Cas, the angel shot the bewitched weapon, hitting the replica of the eldest Winchester right between the eyes. With a deafening screech, the figure faded away along with the weapon that Castiel had been holding.

“Sam, the gun!” Castiel shouted over to the human, who had the creature that resembled his brother pinned down below him. In the shuffle, Sam didn’t hear him the first time, so Cas had to yell once more. “Sam, the gun, you have to use the gun!”

Sam reached over to grab the shotgun that had been pushed over to the side during their own scrabble just as the creature rolled them over so that he was on top. Staring up at the green-eyed creature, Sam placed the end of the barrel against his chest, right below a strangely shaped necklace.

“Sammy,” the thing purred, “you can’t shoot me.”

“Wanna bet?”

The creature laughed, pressing up against the shotgun. “You’re gonna shoot your big brother and you don’t even remember his name.” He shook his head, feigning sadness. “After all that I did for you . . .” 

Castiel took a couple steps closer, but Sam shot him a look, telling him to stay back. 

“You freaks can’t manipulate me anymore,” he growled, placing his finger on the trigger, ready to shoot at any second.

“What’s my name, Sammy?”

“You don’t have one.” Sam pulled the gun back. The creature started to crawl up before the human smashed his foot down where the barrel had been seconds ago, effectively restraining him as he pointed the gun instead at the false hunter’s forehead. “You’re not Dean.” 

With a bang, the whole world went dark.


	7. Devil in Disguise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "What would Cas ever do to hurt him? This was the only thing in this whole realm that he could ever trust in a million years. This was the angel he was falling in love with. He had saved him from the very depths of Hell and the damnation of eternal torture. It was going to be okay.
> 
> It was not going to be okay."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Holy smokes it's been a while since I last posted, and I am very sorry about that. School has been a pain but I'll try to get the next two chapters up faster than that.
> 
> Warning: This chapter contains descriptions of drowning as well as a mention of child abuse. Proceed with caution.

“ _You fooled me with your kisses,  
You cheated and you schemed,  
Heaven knows how you lied to me,  
You're not the way you seemed.  
You look like an angel,  
Walk like an angel,  
Talk like an angel,  
But I got wise._”  
— **“(You’re the) Devil in Disguise” by Elvis Presley**  


For about a year when Sam was four or five years old, the little boy became a pack rat. No matter where they went on what he thought to be his father’s “endless vacation” all around the country, Sammy always had to grab something to stow away in the beloved car. Whether it was an old gum ball retrieved from a rusted machine in an Atlanta diner, a handful of dying bluegrass (which he was upset did not look at all blue) from a picnic out in Kentucky, a demented looking stuffed animal slightly resembling one of the Flintstones that he insisted his older brother Dean win him in a restaurant in the suburbs of Cincinnati, or even those little green army men another one of Dad’s friends living in Oregon had gotten him that mysteriously got jammed into the ashtray by some unknown force. Sam had to hold on to everything, as if the boy—who would grow up to sell his soul to the very creatures that sent him on that vacation in the first place—wanted to chart out his whole adventure by collecting a million trinkets. John Winchester would roll his eyes at his son, and whenever the “pile of trash” in the back seat got to be too much, the man would take what he could and throw it in the dumpster of whatever motel they were staying at while Sammy slept. In the morning, the little boy would get in the car and silently look in devastation at the clean interior, wondering who would have stolen all his precious memorabilia of the big trip. 

No matter how much it hurt the boy, he would never cry or beg his father to help him find his stuff. Men didn’t cry, at least that was what Dad always insisted. When Dean hurt his arm real bad on one of his special trips with Dad, the oldest Winchester smacked him across the face when Sammy’s brother started to sob. After it happened, he turned to his youngest son, breath smelling of something vile, and gave him a long look before going to walk away.

Sam was on the verge of beginning kindergarten when his pack rat phase was coming near an end. He watched his Dad go out one night through the blinds of the motel window, seeing him taking all his earnings and tossing them away with all the disgusting trash from the inn. His excitement over all the trinkets he’d come encounter with diminished, and his older brother never wanted to win him any new toys anymore, either. For the most part, he contented himself with playing with the same handful of Legos stowed away in the trunk and the three Hot Wheels cars he kept in his bag, one of which was missing two wheels from an unfortunate fall from the second floor.

The last time he ever collected a toy, they were in Indiana, spending time at one of the beaches alongside Lake Michigan. Dad was doing his usual “business”, so Uncle Bobby had come out to watch them and decided to take them to the lake. Uncle Bobby insisted it was a “good, normal thing” for the two boys to do, something that Sammy wouldn’t understand the meaning of for a long time. The man sat in a beat-up folding chair with a cold beer in his hand while he watched the two boys play in sand for the first time. 

Sam found the little shell while making his first sand castle. Originally the light pink piece sat atop the structure, like a crown atop a king’s head. When Bobby called them in at the end of the day and Sam realized he had to abandon the sandy home, he quickly grabbed the shell and stuffed it in his pocket. 

“You know, Sam, they say you can hear the ocean in seashell,” Bobby told the boy in the drive back to the motel while Sam examined his finding. “Do you hear anything in that one?”

In the present day, Sam coughed up a lung full of sand after he came to. He had landed somehow on a beach, a whole collection of seashells scattered around him like an audience coming to see him perform. No, they weren’t just randomly scattered. They were shaped like a flock of birds flying south for the winter, a perfect V pattern. Overhead, a loud gang of seagulls flew by, making themselves clearly known to the man several feet below. Once the seagulls’ shouts were fading away, he focused on the sound of the ocean waves crashing against the shore. They sounded angrier than he expected.

“Sam?”

Castiel had appeared in front of Sam, seemingly out of nowhere. He extended a hand for the hunter to grab, assisting him in standing up before embracing the taller man as soon as he was on his feet. The gesture felt kind of weird, since Cas had never really been so freely affectionate before. Sure, they’d had a couple moments back in the layer before, but it still felt awkward in a way that wasn’t really Cas-awkward. Sam only questioned it for a few moments before letting himself melt into the kind gesture. It was good to be this close to the other, taking in the gentle warmth radiating out of the angel. He imagined what it would be like if the angel had his wings, how soft and comforting it would be having them wrapped tightly around Sam like a blanket.

“We’re close, Sam. I can feel it, can you?” 

Sam backed up from the embrace, thinking for a second. In a way, he could feel that they were nearing the end of the journey. All the walls and roadblocks that had appeared in his mind before were no longer present. There was nothing he couldn’t think of—or at least graze upon the surface of. Every memory from Hell to Earth and in between was accessible. 

“Yeah, I—I think I can feel it.” 

He looked over toward the dark blue waves of the ocean as they came in towards him, inching closer with each bigger wave. The water never seemed this violent whenever he’d been to beaches. Maybe another storm was going to come. After all, he could see dark clouds approach in the distance, an ominous threat lurking around the horizon. Cas would be able to find them a good shelter in time, he almost always could. Sam turned his head to check back on the angel, noticing something even more out of the ordinary about him.

“Where’s the charm you had before?” 

Castiel shrugged. “I think I may have lost it in the sand when I landed here. I couldn’t find it at all, but I think I can sense a wave of energy nearby. This layer seems much smaller than all the other ones before. Here, we need to find some shelter before that storm comes in.” The angel gestured Sam to follow him away from the water, off toward the grassy land beyond the sand. 

Not long after the sand turned to grass, the grass turned to forest. The two had only trekked about a mile in when they found a string of abandoned huts wedged in between the trees, like a miniature ghost town made entirely of wood. The placement seemed oddly convenient next to how far they had to hike to get the smallest scrape of decent land everywhere else. Something had to be up in this realm.

“Can you hear anything in there?” Sam asked, approaching the closest one slowly.

Castiel shook his head. “No, it doesn’t seem like there’s anything here.” He pulled out his angel blade, though he didn’t hold it up yet. “Perhaps it’s a trap, but I think it’s worth a check.”

Sam nodded, even though his stomach felt uneasy about the whole situation. He trusted Cas no matter what, so he didn’t doubt that the angel would keep him safe and have his best interests in mind. 

With Castiel in front, the two men walked into the little shack together. Inside of it, they didn’t find any pack of demons or any cursed-looking objects—in fact, they really didn’t find much of anything. There was a table with two hardly stable chairs made of the same wood as the dwelling on one side and a worn down mattress pushed up against a wall on the other side. By the door, there were hooks most likely intended for tools, but nothing was found hanging from them. Either someone had once lived there and moved out completely, or the place had been built without ever housing a single soul. Remembering where they were, Sam assumed it was more likely the latter. The hut was just a piece of the scenery. 

“Well, this is different,” Sam said, cautiously taking a seat atop the mattress. “Do you think demons like to go vacationing here?”

Castiel hid his blade back inside his signature trench coat. “It’s strange, but for one night I don’t think it could hurt.” He sat down beside Sam on the stiff mattress, a little too close. Despite being so uncomfortably near, he stared directly forward as he spoke, not making any eye contact. “If the storm comes in, it’ll keep us safe and dry, at least. Then tomorrow we can locate the portal. I feel it isn’t far from here.” The man didn’t truly feel how close the other had gotten until he turned his head, blue eyes piercing right through him. “Don’t you think so?”

Whatever unintelligible response Sam had to offer got stuck in his throat, too lost in the fact that Cas was hardly inches away from him. He had never been so close to his savior, able to see every single dark eyelash bordering those deep blues. Every inch of his skin felt like it was on fire all over again as he fought his desire to close the space between them. Surely Cas wasn’t this oblivious, surely he knew how he made the righteous man’s head spin like an endless top, surely he had a reason behind this mind trip he put Sam through. If not anything else, the holy creature had to hear the way his heartbeat went completely through the roof and right up into the clouds any time he got this close. 

A strong hand slithered up onto Sam’s thigh. One of the first conversations between him and the angel came to his mind. What had the angel called them? Keys? Locks? Seals, they were seals. There was at least sixty of them, he recalled. The first of the seals that would spring Lucifer free from his cage deep in the heart of Hell was that the righteous man would give in to the temptations of Hell, whatever that was. The hand on his thigh tightened as Castiel moved closer just a half of an inch, and the grip felt like razor sharp fangs of a serpent releasing venom into his blood stream. Something was wrong, something was very off. Castiel’s touch never made him feel sick before. Maybe it was just his nerves of the whole situation.

The hand backed off his thigh, snaking up to caress his cheek. “What’s wrong, Sam? You look . . . tense.” God, it was like every second the angel was finding ways of getting even closer to Sam without directly touching him, and it made the hunter woozy. He needed to lie down and sleep off whatever this was going through his head, as well as just get away from the angel for a second. 

“I need to—I need to go—I need,” Sam stammered, trying to pull back away and clear his mind. He hardly got far at all before Castiel stroked his cheek and a wave of calm went through him. This was Cas. What would Cas ever do to hurt him? This was the only thing in this whole realm that he could ever trust in a million years. This was the angel he was falling in love with. He had saved him from the very depths of Hell and the damnation of eternal torture. It was going to be okay.

It was going to be okay.

Then Castiel leaned in and closed the distance, connecting their lips.

It was not going to be okay.

As much as Sam wanted to just embrace the wrongness of the situation and let himself enjoy what he’d been waiting so long for, the voice in the back of his head came back, screaming out how dirty-bad-wrong it felt. He had wanted this for so long—why did it feel so off? Sam backed away before he could return the kiss, needing to get away and breathe.

“I think I need to lie down. G-get some rest,” the human murmured.

There was a look that was almost anger in Castiel’s eyes. “Very well,” he said, standing up and walking off to the other side of the cramped cabin, taking a seat at the table.

*

That night, Sam barely slept. The memory of the awful kiss kept projecting itself inside his mind whenever he closed his eyes, playing over and over again like a terrible TV re-run. Every time it played a rush of nausea and discomfort flooded his system. It perplexed him why something he’d wanted deep down for so long had been so awful once it finally happened. Had Hell worn him down so far that he could no longer enjoy pleasurable things? Or was it the fear that this was just another simulation? After all, Cas just didn’t seem quite like Cas ever since they’d gotten here. Everything seemed so clear and real, though. All the other times he’d been brainwashed by something here or seen one of the creatures resembling the people from his life on Earth, there’d been a level of dreaminess to the experience. The whole event came to him almost like a lucid dream, as if deep down he could sense that this was not actually happening. Right now, though, none of that mysticism clouded his perception. Sam felt one-hundred percent here and aware, and Castiel was clear and concrete, despite the uneasy vibes he gave off. Maybe something about Hell was finally getting to the angel. The hunter had no idea what kind of things angels go through as they travel through all these layers. 

When morning came, Sam got up from the lumpy mattress, working on collectively four hours of sleep. Neither of them brought up the events of the night before as they gathered themselves up to get ready to continue their traveling, which only made Sam more suspicious. He fully expected some sincere apology from his blue-eyed companion, or at least anything to explain what happened. Maybe a demon bug wormed its way into his head or a red mist sent him into a bad trip. No explanation whatsoever just didn’t seem right, but the human soul didn’t know how to bring the topic up. “Hey, why did you make a pass at me last night?” didn’t seem like an appropriate thing to ask a higher being. 

“Are you sure you know where the next portal is?” asked Sam as they exited through the squeaking door. The sky looked just as it did the day before, the dark storm looming over the horizon almost as if it hadn’t moved a single inch. Come to think of it, the man couldn’t recall any storm ever hitting them during the night. With how often he woke up during his attempts at slumber, he would have noticed a storm as large as what the clouds alluded to previously. Were they waiting for something? 

Castiel didn’t even seem to notice the sky above as he lead the human deeper into the forest past the gathering of shacks. “I can feel the energy coming off it. It’s very strong in this place.”

“How far do you think it is?”

The angel glared toward him as he sliced through a couple branches with his blade, clearing a path through the thicket. “Well, aren’t you full of questions today, Samuel?”

That name sounded unnatural coming out of Cas’s mouth. Not once in all the months that they had been traveling together had he ever used that name for the soul. 

“What is up with you?” Sam demanded.

“Another question. Riveting.”

“That. That right there. You have this—this—this attitude right now. Is something up that I don’t know about?” Sam chewed on his lip nervously for a moment before asking yet another question. “Is this about last night?”

There was a pause as Castiel continued to stare forward at the trees he was slicing up to make way. “Yes,” he answered curtly. 

Sam opened his mouth up to speak, but his train of thought was lost right before it left the station. He had no actual response to that. Stopping while he was ahead, he glued his mouth shut for the rest of the walk up toward the next portal. It would be better off that way, since clearly there was something in the air messing with his angel’s head. This was not the kind, careful, compassionate being that pulled him out of perdition and brought him all the way here. They needed to get the hell out of Hell before it made them both go even further off the deep end.

They spent most of the day walking, despite Cas’s insistence of how close the thing was. The woods seemed to get thicker and thicker with every mile they passed, as if the forest was a living creature trying to swallow the two travelers up in its green stomach. Occasionally they would cross a narrow stream or see a bird up above, but other than that the forest was just the same trees again and again. Sam actually started to miss the water from all the other layers, because all this green was starting to make him feel sickly green. The angel’s surly attitude along with all the sharp twigs Sam stepped on made him lust for Earth even more than before. Earth or Hell, either or, just anything but this cruel cold shoulder from the angel.

Every hour or so, Sam would look up at the sky again to see if the balance of blue to black had changed at all. While time passed by, the storm didn’t make any progress across the sky. It remained as before, hovering over the ocean far behind, a harbinger of something mysterious and dangerous to come. Hopefully they wouldn’t be there long enough to find out what that was.

With Castiel nearly silent, he had to try to remain observant to look for clues that they were getting closer. Over time, the dense cluster of trees began to thin out once the sun stood far out in the western sky. He took this as a sign that whatever they were searching out was coming up fast. 

Soon, he found out he was right. The trees continue to move further and further apart until the man and the angel came to a clearing. About fifty feet off from the end of the forest was a sinkhole that seemed bottomless. Right away, it fit the description of a portal rather well with how it looked to go nowhere.

“We made it,” Cas sighed, grabbing harshly at his companion’s wrist. Once again, the touch pierced through his skin like venomous fangs puncturing his flesh. Instinctively, Sam stood still. “Sam, what are you doing?”

“Something’s wrong here.”

Looking up, he noticed the dark clouds finally starting to approach.

“What are you talking about?” Castiel said, the poison hold tightening on the human’s wrist. 

A sound coming from behind them in the forest caught both of their attention. Sam looked back toward it, seeing leaves rattling as if something large were coming for them. In response, Castiel began to drag Sam over toward the hole in the ground. The first drops of rain splashed onto his bare shoulder, and he thought back to all the shells scattered in the sand. The way they were all formed together, a perfect V pointing towards the water. 

Sam shook his head, trying to plant himself in the dirt to keep himself from being pulled further. “Cas, something is wrong. We need to go back to the beach. I don’t think this is the right portal. I just really feel like we need to go back to the beach.”

“Sam. I am telling you. This is where the portal is,” Castiel growled through his teeth.

“I would think you’d find a more clever way of dragging the brat back down than just tossing him down a convenient rabbit hole.”

They turned back around towards where the leaves had been rustling just moments earlier. A short, stout man dressed almost entirely in black stood with his hands in his pockets, casually strolling towards them. He spoke with a thick British accent, and the closer he came to them, the shorter he appeared. Around his neck was the violet charm that Castiel had lost.

“I mean really, where is the style in that?”

Castiel snaked one arm around Sam, clutching him with an iron grip, while the other hand held out his angel blade towards the newcomer. “Well, you know what they say, desperate times call for desperate measures. Now, just what do you think you’re doing here, swine?” The voice wasn’t Castiel’s usual gruff tone. It was too high pitched, too conversational and musical. 

“Cas?”

“Hush up, Sammy, the adults are speaking,” Cas replied. Hardly a second later, Sam’s lips sewed themselves together, making it impossible for the human to speak.

“I think that question is better asked of you,” the man in black said. “What are you doing here playing remote controls on our feathered friend while your being is bound in a cage?”

Sam was almost relieved hearing that his suspicions were correct, that whatever this thing was, it wasn’t Castiel. The feeling of disgust and discomfort was not just some mind trick or the atmosphere getting to him. Whatever was in there was something else, something “bound in a cage.”

In a cage.

A mental light bulb went off. 

“If you want a job done right, you’ve got to do it yourself, Crowley.”

The man, Crowley, rolled his eyes. “I know you’ve been rotting in the depths of the pit, but you’d think you’d be able to come up with excuses better than clichés. How can you hate demons when you talk like that? Grab a thesaurus once in a while.”

“I’ll try to grab one on my way up. But for now, I’m going to take Santa’s Little Helper here down with me. If you want to remain in one piece by the time I get out, I suggest you give up this whole turncoat thing and let me be on my merry way.” Not-Castiel took another step back. “Sound good?”

“See, I don’t have a problem with that, but I have a couple of friends that might not be quite as fond of that.”

From within the sinkhole came the sound of a pack of dogs barking. The thing pretending to be Castiel backed a step away from the hole as the barking got louder and glowing eyes started to appear in the black depths. A shiver ran up Sam’s spine at the memory of the Hellhounds, both the ones he’d acquired a few weeks back and the ones from when he first came in contact with the devilish brutes. It wasn’t long before sharp claws were coming in to sight, the fiends whole figures visible as the climbed to the top of the hole. The creature holding Sam tight backed away more as the hounds hoisted themselves out of the sinkhole. Four of them had made it to the top, and from the sound of growls down below, Sam figured there were at least ten altogether, ready to strike at them. 

“Now, whatever black magic you have over Wings’ head over here needs to quit before I get the pups to chow down on him while I take the boy upstairs myself.”

The creature within Cas let out a cackle. “Pitiful, little demon rat. I would like to see you try,” he said slowly.

The rain fell down harder as the storm clouds moved completely overhead. Sam jumped at the first bright bolt of lightning crashed down only half a mile away from where they were gathered. Closing his eyes, he began to pray to Castiel or any other angel like him. Anyone to just save him from what was to come. 

With a snap of his finger, Crowley’s Hellhounds began to lunge at the thing in Castiel’s skin. He started to slash at them, but too many jumped on him at once for him to be able to fight them all off. Whatever estimate Sam had made earlier about the number of hounds in the waiting had been severely off as dozens of the black beasts crawled out of the sinkhole and swarmed all over the man in the trench coat. Soon enough, all that the human could see was a mass of inky, coarse fur all humped up in a pile, chewing on whatever was below. A wave of nausea hit him as he saw glowing blue blood on the ground. Maybe that wasn’t Cas talking inside of their, but that was definitely Castiel’s vessel being mangled by the beasts.

“The pups won’t be able to keep him down for long,” Crowley said, taking a step towards Sam.

“I don’t know who you are, but I’m not leaving him here,” growled the human.

The short man in black rolled his eyes. “Look, you either stay here and not save your feathered pal, or you come with me and prevent the Apocalypse. Either way, bird-brain is toast, and Lucifer over there is going to eat him for breakfast with a nice spread on top. Now, grab on.” He extended his hand.

Sam looked back toward where Cas was, feeling something twisting up inside. “How can I know I can trust you?”

“Because—”He lifted up the violet charm, which was pointing back towards the water “—I’ve been helping you holy rollers this whole time.”

Sam knew he was out of choices, as much as he wanted to stay back and save Castiel. Had Cas been there with him, the angel would have just wanted him to go on. And the lives of seven billion people had to be more important than Sam’s selfish desires, as much as it hurt to leave behind his friend. He thought about all the people he saved during his life, including his big brother, and he couldn’t let any of them down. 

But this wasn’t just another hunter or another human he couldn’t save. This was _Cas_. The angel that had travelled this far with him and was his only hope at surviving through all of this. His literal guardian angel, who he was leaving with Lucifer. Who knows what the actual devil would do to Castiel? He already lost one person he felt this strongly about, and his heart was already breaking at the thought of going through all of that again. Castiel saved his life and because of that saved the whole world. He deserved better than to be trapped down here or worse. What if he couldn’t make it out? Sam would rather die than let someone so kind and pure take his place in Hell, but was that worth risking the whole world? 

Sam thought back to a game they used to play in grade school when he lived in Maine for a couple months.

_“Person A and Person B are hanging off a cliff and you can only save one of them. Who do you save?”_

From under the growing pile of brutes, he heard a scream that sounded so much like his Castiel. Sam prayed for forgiveness.

*

The next thing he knew, Sam was back at the beach, standing beside the seashells still aligned in their perfect shape. The storm had turned the currents far more volatile, the water looking like vicious dancers throwing themselves at the coast one by one. Rain and ocean water alike splashed onto his face, soaking him within seconds as another bolt of lightning threw itself down only yards away. 

“You ready for a swim?”

Sam turned around to find Crowley. Standing this close, the man looked far shorter than before, almost comically short in any other context.

“Just who the hell are you and why are you helping us?”

“You know, Satan himself is trying to stop you. Now is not really the time for exposition.”

Sam didn’t budge.

Crowley folded his arms. “Fine. I’ll give you the Spark Notes. Crowley, King of the Crossroads—I know, probably not your favorite branch of Hell at this point, but hear me out. Luci wants to stop the clock, and not all of us demons are into stopping the clock. I personally benefit from dumb S.O.B.s like yourself walking around on the Earth instead of flames and archangel fist fights. Also, that archangel riding your pal like a motorcycle on a highway isn’t exactly planning on keeping my kind around once the world is burnt to a blackened crisp. So, I have ample reason to help a ridiculous, moose-sized imp like yourself. Now, are you ready to go or not?”

“What about Cas? Isn’t there anything we can do?”

The demon sighed, covering his face with one of his hands. “Look, I can’t say the star-crossed lovers thing isn’t cute, but Lucifer used a powerful spell to play voodoo with your angel’s mind from within the cage. It’s temporary, but we don’t have the time to wait because my pets back there aren’t equipped to hold him back for long.”

Maybe there really wasn’t anything left to do. Castiel would just have to fend for himself out here in the middle of Hell, probably being over taken by the fallen archangel controlling his head. Sam would never see him again. All he had to remember the angel who saved him was a spoiled first kiss and the sight of him getting mauled by the angry pack of hounds. Might as well have walked in on the angel pinned to a bloody ceiling with fire in his hair all over again. A shudder ran up his spine. 

“How do I get out of here?”

“Think. How did you get to Hell in the first place?”

“I . . . sold my soul?”

Crowley swatted him in the head. “You’re a thick headed block, aren’t you? No, dumbass, what was the last thing that happened to you that made you actually come here?”

“I died?”

A sigh of relief. “Exactly. This is the last layer of Hell, and in order to get you to the gate, you’re going to have to die again.”

“I thought I couldn’t die down here.”

The small demon pointed toward the raging waves. “There’s your exception. Now, like I said, are you ready for a swim?” He grabbed Sam by his long hair, pulling him toward the angry water and tossing him down against a wave. “Now, if you want to save the world and blah blah blah, you’re going to have to drown, and I’m more than happy to assist. Understood?”

“Wait, what about—”

Before he could speak any further, his head was being forced down underneath the hectic currents. Water flooded into his mouth before he could close it, still surprised at the sudden attack. He flailed around helplessly, splashing cold water all around him as his instincts tried to save him from what would come, but even with such a meek stature, the crossroads demon was far stronger than Sam and held his head under the water with ease.   
Ages seemed to pass by as Sam fought and fought, eventually getting weaker until he could fight no more. 

His body began to accept the release of death as fighting took up too much of his precious energy. Crowley let go of him, tossing him out further into the water so the demonic waves could drag him further into the darkness. Under the surface, the back and forth of the dancing water was almost pleasant, carrying the limp soul around and around as he began to fade in and out of consciousness. His oxygen was depleting fast, it wouldn’t be too much longer before the world would go black. He remembered this feeling pretty well. The sharp ache of razor claws digging into his chest, metallic blood filling his mouth and coating every inch of his prone body, someone screaming in the background. Was it Dean? Yes, Dean was holding him now, trying to apply pressure to the wounds as if it were just the normal injury from a hunt. Just a little whiskey and a sewing needle to stitch it up. That wouldn’t work this time, though, the claws went too deep. Breathing became impossible—had they clawed up his lungs, too? Blackness edged at the sides of his vision. He tried to whisper to his brother, something, anything, then nothing. It was all over, too late to do anything else. He felt that again, that tranquil blackness blurring the ends of his vision. He imagined himself being held by Castiel, the angel insisting that he would be fine. If Cas were here, Sam would say he was sorry for everything. He should have gone back and found a way to bring him along to the other side. Cas didn’t deserve to die here, abandoned by his righteous man. This could never have been part of whatever Heavenly mission was assigned. Sam should have saved him like he had been saved. Under water, his attempt at whispering an apology failed. 

Lights out.

Lights on.

Completely dry, Sam stood on the edge of a burgundy cliff. Peeking down into the cliff, he saw a dark, bottomless pit. The pit had a sort of magnetic pull on the man, trying to persuade him to move closer, jump right in and get lost in the nothingness it had to offer. But that was not the right way out. A charm around his neck pointed its sharp tip behind him, toward a blindingly white threshold far behind him. 

The red ground began to rumble as a furious earthquake raked through the land Sam was standing on. Parts of the rocky cliff started to fall off, descending down into the blackness. The man just barely jumped away as the portion he stood on began to break off and throw itself into the abyss. With no time to spare, he dashed off in the direction of the light, pushing his legs as fast as they allowed and then even faster. Black shadows like bats flew down at him, hindering him in his chase and block his path, but he pushed on. Green and rotting hands popped out from the surface, scratching and grabbing at his worn out ankles, but he pushed on. He could see freedom right before him now, and nothing would be able to stop him. 

Just before passing through the gateway, a familiar voice cried out to him, but he pushed on.


	8. Earth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> His heart flooded with a strange feeling that just sent him into a silent fit of joy because he was alive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been over a month since I updated, and I feel awful. Such a bad spot to leave it on, too, but just one more chapter to go! I will try to get it up within the next couple weeks since stuff is finally slowing down, but we'll see.

“ _We're coming down to the ground;  
There's no better place to go.  
We've got snow up on the mountains,  
We've got rivers down below,  
We're coming down to the ground  
To hear the birds sing in the trees,  
And the land will be looked after  
We send the seeds out in the breeze._”  
— **“Down to Earth” by Peter Gabriel**  


The first breath of air climbing into his lungs was an unparalleled relief, setting every single cell in his body ablaze with bright life. The righteous man flopped onto the soft soil, exhausted from his desperate crawl up onto the surface from where he had been buried. Black-brown dirt coated his face, caked itself onto his hair, and trapped itself under his nail beds from the struggle out of his grave, but now he was finally free. The sun never before shined as it did now up above him; its light felt as if it were washing away something deeply rooted inside of Sam, cleansing away all the impurities inside his body. Everything was loud, and every little insignificant detail above him was so important. Nothing seemed worth losing this, this world that he loved so much, this life that he loved to live. His heart flooded with a strange feeling that just sent him into a silent fit of joy because he was _alive_. 

Once he recovered from his final escape, Sam stood up to assess the rest of his surroundings beyond the beautiful, cloudless sky. What encircled him was not as beautiful as what hung above. He stood at the center of an enormous circle of flattened and decimated trees. The whole grove looked as if a miniature H-bomb had come and blasted around his grave, leaving nothing but dirt and collapsed bark in its aftermath. It was eerie, but Sam didn’t really want to stick around and investigate any further. He needed to find some sort of civilization and some sort of phone as soon as possible. There were people that he needed to see, and his stomach ached with how hungry he was.

It took a couple good miles before he found anything. Angry growls continued to sound from his stomach. He searched his pockets, hoping that maybe Dean had left his wallet on him when he buried him, but all he found was a cell phone that had been dead for months. Like that really did him any good out here all alone. 

His shoulder began to ache as well about a mile in on the walk. Sam tried to ignore it and focus on something other than the pain in his upper arm and his stomach, but neither would relent as he strolled along. To think, he went through all of that traveling to get out of Hell only to have to hike another hundred miles on Earth. The sun’s light didn’t seem so relieving, either, once he got onto his third mile. That damn star in the sky was far hotter than Sam remembered, and he was already working up a sweat using these stiff limbs. His soul never got this exhausted downstairs. Having an actual, physical body was such a pain, and that damn shoulder kept irritating him. 

One more mile and then he finally saw it in the distance. You could hardly call it a town, all he saw were a couple cheap motels and a gas station. All it could be classified as was a pit stop. He must be in a fairly depopulated area, maybe somewhere deep in Nebraska or a surrounding state. Speeding up, he made his way to the gas station, figuring they’d have an operational phone he could use. 

As he entered the convenience store of the gas station, he immediately regretted the decision as his stomach started to grumble loudly at the sight of all the cheap, unhealthy snacks littered around the aisles. Even with how he practically grew up on gas station food, the rotting pizza sitting in the clear plastic boxes on the counter never looked the least bit appetizing, but today he stared at the disgustingly greasy dough circle as if it were a prime rib at a five-star restaurant. Repeatedly, he had to remind himself that he had no money and the last thing he needed now or ever was to get arrested in the middle of nowhere for stealing from a gas station. Reluctantly, he kept his eyes down and away from all the food as he ambled toward the counter.

There were only two people inside of the shop: the pimply teenage boy behind the counter with a mess of curly hair and a sweet old lady, nearly too short to see between the few aisles. The boy looked at Sam with shocked eyes, probably because he was still coated in a thin layer of dirt, but the woman hardly batted an eye at him.   
“Hi, um. Can I use your phone?” Sam said awkwardly after approaching the startled kid.

“It’s in the back. Sir,” the worked replied in a shaky voice. He pointed behind Sam to where a pay phone hung on the wall beside a refrigerator full of every kind of cheap beer.

Sam’s empty stomach dropped at the sight of the pay phone. No, there had to be something else that he could do. Some way to get a hold of someone.

He turned back towards the kid working the counter. “Hey, look, I lost my wallet, so I really, really need to use a phone but I have no change or anything for that. Don’t you have a phone back there or maybe a couple quarters you could spare?”

Sam tried to flash a smile, but the little twerp didn’t budge.

“Sir, company policy says I cannot allow a customer to use the private phone nor can I give a customer money.”

“Please. I have been through Hell and back, kid, and I really, really need to call my family.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t help you. Maybe the motel across the street will let you use the phone, but r-right now I have to help the next customer.”

He turned around spotted the old woman, now carrying a basket full of snacks.

“Are you having trouble, dear?” she asked in a sweet, soprano voice. Something was strange about the way that she looked at him now, almost like she recognized him. Sam moved out of the way so that the cashier could begin to ring up her items.

“Oh, it’s nothing. Got um, lost and had car troubles.”

She shot him a too bright and too friendly smile. “Well, if you need to use a phone, I think I may have left mine in the car. Now, if you don’t mind carrying an old woman’s bag to her car, I’ll let you borrow it for a quick second.” Finishing up her transaction, she handed the loaded plastic bag over to Sam.

Cautiously, he took it and followed her out of the store. Once they were out of earshot of the minimum wage worker, the older woman spoke again.

“You know, you really should have just waited for me there. You lot from this century—you’re all so impatient, always in such a hurry.” She shook her head, a few strands escaping from her carefully tied up silver hair. 

Sam looked down at her, not sure if he should be bracing himself. Surely, if someone was coming after them, they would have at least picked a form a little bit taller than this, right? 

“I know, you must be confused,” she continued, fiddling through a large, beige purse that almost looked handmade. Maybe it was. She pulled out a set of keys that were adorned with several key chains, all looking like they were from different vacation spots. “But, it’s all right, son. We have a mutual friend. I’m just here to make sure you get home safe.”

It didn’t take Sam too much longer to figure out who the woman was. “You’re an angel?”

She beamed up at him for a moment on the way to her little green car. “So there are some brains hidden behind all that beauty. The name’s Selaphiel.” The angel extended a frail hand covered in brightly colored rings, all of which looked far bigger than her tiny fingers. Sam shook it after a moment of slight confusion, not really expecting to encounter an angel like this after spending so much time with his stone-faced companion. “Don’t be shy. I got assigned to escort you back to safety after news spread that Castiel . . . hadn’t made it out with you.” Unlocking the door to the passenger seat of the car, she held it open for Sam.

The car was difficult to get into with just how tall the human was, but he managed to squeeze his long legs in. Looking down at the bag of snacks, he started to wonder what exactly they were for if she was an angel and didn’t eat.

Selaphiel got into the driver’s side, glancing over at him before starting the car up. “Those are for you. After being dead as long as you’ve been, you’re probably a little hungry. There’s a couple bottles of water and a couple different bags of goodies.” She pointed into the bag for a moment before pulling out of the parking lot and getting on the road. Sam noticed that there was a subtle drawl in her voice. “I hope you like gummy worms. This little one I babysit back home, Maria, whenever she falls from her bike or gets upset, I always go and buy her a bag of gummy worms from the 7/11. Those little sweets just always perk her up, oh, she loves them. I thought they’d be a nice touch after all the awful things you’ve gone through.”

“Thank you,” he said in a small voice. He wanted to be coyer about it, but once he got the green light to start eating, he dug into that bag of gummy worms to finally appease the emptiness in his stomach. 

“So, where am I headed to, dear?”

It would be impossible to track down Dean, and in hindsight calling him might not be taken too seriously. His best bet would be to just go straight to Bobby’s. 

“Sioux Falls, South Dakota.”

“Well, lucky day, because that’s only about two hours north of here. Whoever dug your little hole in the ground probably wanted to keep you close, huh?”

Sam let out a small laugh. “Yeah, I guess so.”

With his hunger mostly sated from the bag of gummy worms as well as two smaller bags of pretzels, he became aware of the ache in his shoulder again. Curious, he rolled up the sleeve to see if maybe he’d sustained some sort of injury on his crawl out. He didn’t discover any normal injury, though, just a bright red and swollen hand print. 

“Sometimes,” Selaphiel said softly, “when a soul is saved, the angel that saved them leaves a mark. I’m sure that hand print looks awful familiar to you.”

Sam traced around the edges of the abnormal mark, something deep inside feeling as though it were eating away at the lining of his stomach. Just like maggots but worse.

“Is he . . . ?”

The frail woman sighed. “We don’t know for sure, but at this point it doesn’t look too good, hun.”

He looked out the window, watching as fields of green grass passed by him. No one had made him feel the way that Cas did in years. A weird part of him wondered if he was cursed somehow with how everyone he cared too much for seemed to die at some point or another—his parents, his brother, his fiancée. Castiel might just be another casualty caused in part by Sam’s very existence. His eyes stayed glued out the window for several silent minutes to come, the guilt settling in stronger than ever before. 

“Look, I’m not like the other angels,” began Selaphiel after some time of silence. “I pride myself in being around people. I love interacting with humans. Each of you is like a whole experience, a whole set of ideas and novel thinking that the creatures in Heaven will never understand. Spending time with your kind is the closest thing to meeting God in my humble opinion. Because of that, I can read a person pretty well, I think.” She pursed her lips, glancing over towards Sam for a moment. “I can tell he meant a lot, and I know it’s hard for you that he might not come out of this one. Castiel was my brother, just like all the angels, but never have I seen one of my kin with such guilt in his heart. Being able to save you saved him. All of us go into our missions knowing that we might not come out. He would never, ever want you to feel guilt like he had. The fact that you are alive and safe, and that the world is now safe—that’s enough that he would be at peace. He did not fail his mission.”

The man wanted to believe all she was saying, wanted to except that Cas might just be another one that couldn’t be saved, but he couldn’t deny that it hurt him in such a selfish way. Still, he gave her a half-hearted smile and lost himself in thought for most of the rest of the trip.

*

The drive to Bobby’s really wasn’t that long of a trip. Once Selaphiel got the memo that Sam wasn’t going to be talking much for the car ride, she turned on a barely-reliable soft rock station, keeping it at a comfortably low level to give some liveliness to the car without being overbearing. Riding in the car felt so surreal to Sam. Before Hell, he spent almost all of his life in the backseat and then the passenger seat of the Impala. Relaxing on old leather seats and looking out the window at the empty high way was like coming home after all these years—even if here they’d only been a few months. 

Nostalgia clouded his mind as they drove through the familiar neighborhood. Each house on the street was just as recognizable as his destination, even to the point where he noticed the subtle differences since the last time he’d been in Sioux Falls. The blue house with the gray roof painted their garage white after years of it being a lighter shade of gray, the house on the corner that always had children playing in front of it now had a new looking Chevy, the corner store just outside the neighborhood changed its name for the fifteenth time in the past five years. All just little reminders that the world kept on going while Sam was dead.

“Which one of these is it?”

He pointed to the shabby blue house off at the end of the road. That house was a little more distant from all the other ones on the street. Even in a nice town like this, Bobby still liked to keep an air of privacy around himself. Pretty sensible thing to do when you’re exorcising demons in your basement on the regular, but Bobby’s been in that place even before he turned to his latest occupation. 

As Selaphiel pulled up in front of the house, Sam got concerned. Maybe he should have called or something before, gave Bobby some sort of warning about his visit. There was a good chance that Bobby, the paranoid old bastard that he was, would just try to attack him on sight. Even if he could explain himself, Bobby had been furious with Sam the whole last year that he was alive because of the deal that he’d made. There was no way Bobby could or would ever forgive him for selling his soul.

“How are you feeling, Sam?” the angel asked in her sweet voice when she sensed his hesitation.

Sam gave a shrug, trying to hide his nerves. “Just nervous about the homecoming. I’ll be good, though.” Taking in a deep breath, he unbuckled from the seat and opened the door to get out. “Thank you again for everything.”

She beamed up at him from the driver’s seat. “My pleasure, dear. If you need anything else, I think you know how to call me.” Selaphiel placed her hands together as if she were praying before giving the human a quick wink.   
When Sam turned around to approach the familiar house, he heard the car start back up and drive off behind him. No going back now. Sighing heavily, he silently reminded himself that he had just dealt with forty some years of hellish torture, excruciating trials, and the quite possible death of his only companion in Hell. The wrath of a middle aged man should be the last of his worries after everything he’d been through, but still nothing Meg did to him could ever be as terrifying as an angry Bobby Singer who most certainly is going to assume that Sam is some sort of demon or shapeshifter here to kill him. The trip to the porch was Sam’s own personal green mile. 

Before he even got the chance to knock on the door, it swung open violently and the barrel of a rifle was wedged between his ribs. To be fair, this wasn’t just paranoia but a pretty normal greeting from any hunter. The look of absolute raging fire in the eyes glaring up at him, however, was a pretty new feature to the greeting. 

Raising his hands up like a captured criminal, Sam broke the uncomfortable moment of silence. “Hi.”

The gun jabbed harder into his chest. “Who the hell do you think you are?” Bobby growled slowly, articulating each word harsh enough to make Sam cringe a little.

“Look, I know you’re never going to believe me, but I can explain.”

“I don’t want any God damned explanation from you, you shifter son of a bitch. Now give me one good reason why I shouldn’t stuff your ass full of silver bullets.”

“I’m not a shifter.”

Bobby laughed with the same bitterness. “What, are you some demon digging up corpses now?”

Sam took in a deep breath before starting to recite the first prayer that came to mind. “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name—”

“Fine, so you ain’t some black eyed bastard, but that doesn’t mean you ain’t some shape-shifting bastard.”

The younger man extended his arm, keeping his eyes glued up on his surrogate uncle. “Cut my arm then, I don’t care. I just want you to hear me out.”

Bobby continued to glare at Sam for a few seconds, looking him up and down a couple times before relenting. Still holding the rifle with one hand, he reached with the other into his back pocket, pulling out a small blade made entirely of silver. Sam extended his arm even further, making it easy for Bobby to reach it with the gun keeping them apart. After a second to glare up at him once more, Bobby slid the knife across his forearm, only going about an inch before pulling it back. Seeing that Sam hadn’t reacted to the silver in any abnormal way, he slowly withdrew the knife and even more slowly lowered the gun. Staying glued where he was, he pulled out something else from his front pocket.

“Dean, you’re gonna want to come down here quick,” he murmured into the phone. 

*

“Let me get this straight—you almost started the damn _Apocalypse_?”

The two had been talking for a while now, already onto their third round of drinks as they waited for Dean to join them. He wasn’t that far off, only up in North Dakota finishing up a case hunting a pack of vampires. That thought kind of worried Sam: Dean being all alone taking on five or maybe even more bitty assholes. That was not the kind of case that you go alone on, but he didn’t doubt that at this point Dean probably had done dozens of cases like that all by himself.

Sam took a deep breath. He’d tried to explain the whole situation as simply as possible before, but Bobby kept probing in to everything detail the younger man tried to gloss over.

“There was some prophecy, I don’t know. Cas—the um, the angel that rescued me—he told me about it that if this supposedly righteous man, which I guess was me, were to succumb to the temptation of Hell, it would be the first seal to bust Lucifer out of his cage.”

“How many seals are there?”

“Around 66, I think.”

“Well, what the hell does this temptation thing mean anyway?”

Sam sighed. “It was really fuzzy to me when I was down there, but thinking back now they had this sort of hierarchy down there. The only way to stop being tortured was to agree to torture, and I guess even when I forgot who I was and what I was saying no to, I kept denying her.” He took a long sip from his bottle of beer. “I think that might be what they meant.”

Bobby nodded. “Right, so you were down there for four months, but it felt like decades. How long did it take you to get out of there?”

“It was just a couple months down there, I think,” Sam said. He scratched his neck, trying to do the mental math of what the equivalent up here would be. There were thirty days in a month on Earth, and a month on Earth would be about ten years in Hell. Three days on Earth would be a year. A day would be about four months in Hell. The realization shocked Sam, leaving him staring down at the bottle as he answered the question. “Maybe a little over half a day, if that.”

The older hunter looked just as surprised at that statistic. “Damn. You were still in the pit while I was taking out the trash yesterday, and now here you are.” Bobby looked up at the boy he’d helped raise with a genuine smile on his face, something Sam didn’t think he’d see for another forty years. “I’m glad you’re back, son. Things aren’t the same without you. Your brother—he isn’t the same without you. Never seen him get so . . .” He trailed off on his explanation, looking down at his own bottle as his expression dropped. “He spends all his time trying to find a way to get you back. I don’t think he sleeps, just stays up all night hunting down any and all lore about raising the dead. He wouldn’t admit it to me himself, but I heard down the grape vine that he’d tortured a few witches a couple weeks back. They were hardly anything even, just a few soccer moms that got overzealous, but he heard that one of them raised their daughter’s roadkill cat from the dead and he just lost it. He blames himself for getting offed in the first place.”

Sam cringed, not just because of what his brother was doing while he was absent, but because he had a strong feeling that had the tables been turned, he would have also been doing some fucked up things to get Dean back.

“He shouldn’t be blaming himself. It’s my fault. Him getting killed in the first place, me getting tricked into thinking I had to make a deal, me actually being foolish enough to make the deal, it was all just a ploy in some demonic prophecy. I should’ve known better, Bobby. I mean, if Castiel hadn’t come for me—” He broke off as the thought of Cas came back to him. Throughout the whole conversation, he tried not to talk much about the angel, even totally omitting the fact that he had abandoned him in Hell to run off with Crowley.

Seeing the other’s discomfort, Bobby quickly changed the subject. He went on to talk for a while, bringing the resurrected man up to speed with basically every single hunter he’d ever come in contact with. The sun set as Bobby told the story of Marge Gutierrez’s close call with a Manipogo during a trip to Canada, and by the time he got to the story of Teddy Mathews losing a couple fingers while hunting down a Rugaru, Bobby took a break to finally order some take out. They chowed down on mediocre Chinese food from the closest and cheapest place Bobby knew, and the host was just about to begin the story of how his old partner Rufus had to put down a Kraken off the coast of Georgia when there was a knock at the door. 

Bobby stood up, gesturing Sam to stay put where he sat. “I’ll get him, you don’t move.”

Even though he was confined to the kitchen, he could still hear the conversation from the next room over once the door opened. 

“This better be pretty damn important because I had to ditch my plan to drive out to Connecticut to follow a lead,” his brother’s voice grumbled.

“Boy, have I ever said something was important when it wasn’t? Now, look, I gotta show you something in the kitchen and it ain’t an apple pie. I need you to stay calm and not try to shoot anyone.” As if Bobby really followed that advice earlier. “You gotta trust that this is the real deal.” Then, in a softer voice that Sam might not have been meant to hear: “He ain’t showing it much, but he’s still shaken from everything.”

“Who is? Who the hell do you have in there?”

“Just follow me.”

Sam stood up slowly when he heard the two sets of footsteps walk across the creaking wooden floors towards him. Here and now, it seemed so bizarre that Sam had ever forgotten his brother’s name. Even with bags under his eyes and looking like he hadn’t seen the sun in months, he could recognize Dean anywhere. The green eyes he had clung to mentally during all those years of torture now stared at him, wider than the moon. 

There was a long pause as the brothers stared at each other.

“What the hell did you do, Bobby? What is this?” 

“It’s your brother, Dean. And I didn’t do shit.”

Sam took a step closer towards Dean, to which the older Winchester began to reach into his pocket, as if to grab whatever weapon he had concealed. Bobby shot him a glare of warning before Dean could pull anything out.

“I, um, have a lot to tell you,” Sam said. 

And he did. Standing there, expecting his brother to pull a knife on him at any second, the words flooded from his mouth unabridged. He didn’t feel like censoring the story anymore, he didn’t feel like trying to lie about what happened or gloss over the details like he’d done with Bobby. These past years, months, whatever they were had been clinging to his tongue for so long and he needed to talk it out even as he watched his brother nervously. 

He started with the beginning, the very first things he could remember now that his head was totally there. Being thrown in to a crowd of hundreds of demons that all wanted a piece of Sam Winchester, only to be finally claimed and dragged off by Meg who wanted him all to herself. He described the different tortures that the demon had put him through, the physical assaults that made him want to retch at the memory and the emotional games that made him almost tear up. Sam told him about how he lost his mind down there, how he couldn’t remember even the most basic things about his life outside the pit once the years piled up and he started to lose hope he’d ever escape. He told him how she’d try to pressure him to beg her to stop, to do whatever she asked so that she wouldn’t touch him anymore, and how he’d refused again and again. He told him about the morning he’d eaten maggots before the glowing blue savior came to his rescue, taking him away from the demons and leading him to the next layer of Hell.

He described the fire, the way it ate away at his flesh and made him into a human phoenix, the way the Hellhounds had attacked him and brought back flashes of his death. He described the ice, the way he’d almost drowned in the water and the way the creature that looked like Mom tried to lure him back to the pit with her warmth. He described the swamp, the way he never seemed to get dry, the way that the apparitions of the real Meg Masters came to torment him. He described the meadow, how the thing that pretended to be Jess manipulated his emotions to try to keep him with her. He described the mountains where he and Castiel had been chased down by the two huntsmen that resembled Dean and their father. Then he described the beach, how Lucifer had taken control over Cas and tried to trap him back in Hell only for a crossroads demon to be the one to send Sam to the gates by drowning him. He began to shake as he described how he’d abandoned the angel behind him in order to get out of Hell.

Sam nearly felt himself going in a panic before he got to the end of his tail, waking up in the grave and hitching a ride with Selaphiel at the gas station. 

“And then I got to Bobby’s,” he said softly, finally wrapping up the torrent of words.

Dean looked from Bobby to Sam and then back to Bobby, a stunned look on his face. Hearing the full version now, Bobby had the same stunned expression as Dean. 

Taking in a deep breath, Sam took a step back as if to sit down, but his brother caught him by the arm before he could. Dean pulled Sam into a tight embrace, appearing just as shaken as his younger brother at the story. Several seconds passed by before he let go of his little brother and spoke.

“So, what was it like getting to shoot me in the head?”

At any other time, Sam might have gotten annoyed with his brother at the untimely use of comedy, but right now, nothing felt better than to be hearing one of Dean’s awful jokes. He laughed, probably a lot more than was acceptable before going in to hug his big brother once more. 

“You two are clearly having a moment, and I think this night calls for a lot more booze, so I’m going to the corner store. Please try not to break anything while I’m gone.”

The boys let go of each other, smiling over at their uncle as he put on his usual grumpy expression before going to grab his keys and walking out the door. Together, they went to sit down at the table, chowing down on the leftover takeout. The conversation started off awkward, but as they both started to settle into the reality that everyone was alive and well, everything began to flow again with ease. Dean gave him all the details of the hunt he’d just finished up in North Dakota, and then began to describe the next one.

“Now that you’re reborn, do you need to warm up to hunting again or can I trust you to have my back on this gig out in New Haven?”

Sam smiled. “I think I can hold my own.”


	9. Angel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two months passed by until Sam had the dream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally I got this last part up! I hope you guys enjoy it and that you guys have enjoyed the story. It's the first thing I've written in a while, and definitely the first chaptered piece I've put up in a long, long time. It felt great to finally put something out there like this after so long. I'm hoping that in the coming months I can push myself more and more to get back into writing because it's a hobby I love. 
> 
> Warning: This chapter contains sexual content.

“ _Sure enough this morning came unto me,_  
_Silver wings silhouetted against a child's sunrise,_  
_And my angel she said unto me,_  
_‘Today's the day for you to rise_  
_Take my hand, you're gonna be my man, you're gonna rise,’_  
_Then she took me high over yonder._ ”  
— **“Angel” by Jimi Hendrix**

Two months passed by until Sam had the dream.

The Winchester brothers were camping out in a chain motel an hour outside of Portland, Oregon after a successful hunt the day before, a simple salt-and-burn case with a house haunted by a pair of twin poltergeists. While any haunting with poltergeists almost always automatically sucks, the bodies were easy to locate and dig up, only taking a couple days total to complete the job. Now, they were taking a few days to relax after a week long stretch of constant hunting and traveling to catch their breath, though Sam slipped back into his old habits of round-the-clock research, spending most of the night that Dean sat around drinking and watching TV re-runs to look for the next possible case. 

“You can take the kid from the research, but you can’t take the research from the kid,” the older brother grumbled, heading to sleep a couple hours later while Sam still scrolled through news articles on his dinosaur of a laptop. Part of him silently thanked Dean for keeping the thing.

“Don’t act like your lazy ass doesn’t love it.”

Dean flipped him an obscene hand gesture before flopping down onto the bed. Within minutes, Sam heard the comfortingly familiar snores coming from the other side of the room. He never thought in a million years that he would have enjoyed hearing that sound, but being back made him appreciate even the most annoying idiosyncrasies from his brother. Having Dean around made everything so much easier, even with thoughts of Hell and angels still looming over his head most hours of the day. He tried to move past it all, to act like he was one-hundred percent over what happened to him the previous months, but not even having his old life back could erase all that was done. Sam committed to suffering in silence, though, because he rather spend his time that he could with his brother appreciating the fact that for some reason he got to have a second chance.

Because of this silence, though, most of Sam’s nights were spent immersed in nightmares of his experiences. He would never admit it to his suspicious brother, but he stayed up so late each night wandering through news article after news article or even brushing up on obscure lore just so he could avoid sleeping as much as possible until he inevitably passed out, the computer still set upon him. Only a couple hours would pass until he woke up, startled and sweating and re-immersing himself in his studies, only for the cycle to continue multiple times until either the sun woke him up or a groggy Dean did. Sometimes Dean would wake up in the middle of the night and catch sight of his brother shaking or panicking from whatever he’d just seen, but in the morning Sam would always insist that he was fine, despite the growing dark rings under his eyes alluding to the truth.

This night, however, was different. 

Of course, Sam played his usual game where he avoided sleep until his natural bodily function dragged his eyelids down and pulled him under. He lasted only an hour and a half after Dean had scrambled into his bed, being oddly early for Sam, possibly even a new record. For the first time in a long time, most of the night he spent without any dreams until the vision came to him.

Sam was in the middle of the forest, sitting on a pile of dirt with two twigs tied together in front of him like a cross stuck into the ground. Through the cracks in the gentle green foliage, he could see that the sun was bright and burning above him, though its heat was not enough to make him uncomfortable. In fact, a quiet zephyr ruffled through the leaves above, stroking his cheeks and brushing through his hair like a lover’s caress as he stood up on shaky legs. Somewhere deep inside, he recognized this cluster of trees, though they had not looked like this when he saw them last. The twig crucifix hadn’t survived the blast, either, leaving his grave unmarked once he crawled out of Hell. 

Curious, he rolled up his sleeve, finding the familiar red hand print, though it appeared to be glowing ever so slightly. He placed his own hand on top of the print, noticing how even though his fingers were longer, the hand print was a bit wider than his own hand. 

A piercing, high-pitched sound bounced through the trees, striking at Sam’s ears until he was bent over trying to cover them to avoid the deafening noise. When it didn’t relent, he began to navigate through the small forest until he came across to a clearing. The powerful screeching stopped then once the human found the angel standing there, turned so only his back was visible. He wore that same khaki trench coat that had once kept Sam warm through the tundra. 

“I’m sorry if that was too much for your ears. My true voice can be overwhelming for your kind, even like this,” the angel said, still faced away from the man he saved.

Sam took a couple careful steps toward the other. His heart raced inside of his chest, anxious and worried, excited and terrified. He needed to see the angel’s face again, but the thought of seeing the angel again frightened him more than anything else.

“You may come closer. It’s okay.”

He halted for a moment, starting to question if this was some sort of trick or a trap. Surely, it had to be. He would never see the angel otherwise. After a slow, deep breath, Sam took a few steps forward until he was just behind the angel.

“Are you afraid of me, Sam? After what happened?”

In Cas’s gruff voice, the human detected a hint of something vulnerable. Perhaps it was even fear.

“I don’t know,” Sam answered quietly.

Castiel turned around gradually to finally face the taller man, a blank look in his icy blue eyes. The expression seemed different than his usual collected appearance, however. Having spent so much time around Cas and no one else, Sam could spot the subtleties in his face, even now. Whatever look he was trying to convey was very forced and controlled. 

“I need you to tell me. I will leave you alone if so.”

As much as Sam wanted to, he couldn’t look away from the angel’s face. The only places he had seen Castiel’s face since the beach were in nightmares. In those terrors, he never wanted to look too closely at his savior, but now felt so different. He looked over those bright eyes, the pale lips, the deep circles below his eyes. Sam recalled how the first time he’d seen Castiel in this form, he looked so mundane and simple, but looking at those familiar features now, he had never seen anything more angelic than Cas’s simplicity. His angelic accountant.

“I am afraid,” he said honestly, “but not of you. I’m afraid of what I’ve done to you.”

Castiel gave a short nod. “That’s all I needed to know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Give me your hand.”

Confused and concerned, Sam offered up his hand to the angel. Cas took hold of it, and for a brief moment, the human felt something burn itself into his palm. He wanted to ask what happened, what Cas had just done to him, but he couldn’t focus on speaking as the angel’s free hand stroked his cheek. 

“If you are not afraid, find me here. I will wait for you, Sam.”

The next moment he woke up to the bright sun glaring into his face through the motel window. Looking down at his hand, he saw coordinates. 

*

A quick trip to Google Maps revealed the coordinates to be smack dab in the middle of an empty lot about forty five minutes from where the motel was. Dean was skeptical about Sam going out alone, insisting that whatever visions Sam might have could be some sort of trick, but it was nearly impossible to convince his younger brother to be more cautious, especially when Sam pointed out that Dean would go hours out of his way to meet up with old flames when they called him up and never once thought they could be some sort of demon trick. With an annoyed look and an overdramatic eye roll, the older Winchester gave same the keys to his car and ended the argument. 

Still, Sam couldn’t help but gather up some of the weapons from the trunk before driving off. Years of going into uncertain situations taught him all the best places to hide hand guns, silver knives, and small vials of holy water. As much as his heart ached for the best, he was fully aware that this was more than likely some sort of trap. Maybe it was even the angels coming down to smite him so he couldn’t cause any more trouble in Earth or Hell. Sure, he didn’t want to die just yet, but ever since he got out of Hell, the thought didn’t quite scare him as much. The old Sam might have contemplated this plan far more as opposed to this Sam that just woke up and got ready to go. The old Sam would have wanted his brother, maybe even a couple other trusted hunters, to tag along with him to ensure he had backup in case things went south. How many times had he been torn apart and “killed” in Hell? Sam felt desensitized to the idea now. 

Pulling up to the coordinates he’d been given, he now saw more than just an empty lot. The patch of abandoned farmland was a few miles west of smaller reservation. In the middle of the patch of land stood a farmhouse that looked as if no one had lived in it for decades with how its broken windows, falling doors, decimated roof, and peeling yellow paint. To its left stood a weathered silo, lines of red rust running up and down its sides. Sam pulled over on the empty dirt road, breathing in deeply before opening the car door and walking into the field. 

He wandered around for a few painstaking minutes without a sign of anything. His hand hovered over his pocket where his handgun was hidden as his eyes darted all around him. Something rustled in the bushes, causing Sam to jump and bring out his gun as he twirled toward the noise, but it was just a rabbit sprinting past. Sighing, Sam lowered his gun and continued his search, walking around the ramshackle house. The man kept pacing around for about twenty minutes before giving up his search and sitting down on the steps of the porch. Perhaps he’d gotten the coordinates wrong. Perhaps it had been some sort of red herring just to mess with him. Perhaps he was becoming delusional as a result of avoiding all his baggage. 

Sam was only seconds away from standing up and going back to the car when he heard the high-pitched screech from his dream. He doubled over on the porch steps, closing his eyes and squeezing his ears shut with his hands as if it could even begin to muffle the horrendous sound. Just as soon as it began, though, the sound cut off sharply. When he opened his eyes, he heard someone walking behind him on the porch. He hopped to his feet and withdrew his gun once again, turning to point it toward the newcomer.

“Sam?”

He almost dropped his gun as he brought it down with shaking hands. Sam needed to respond, but he felt as if something was clogging up his throat while he stared at the creature in front of him. It couldn’t be real, though, he couldn’t actually be standing there. 

The other took a step closer towards Sam, concern in his blue eyes. 

“You don’t need to be afraid of me, Sam. It’s only me now.”

In the pure sunlight coming down, the angel looked almost surreal. Sam had never before seen him with his Earthly eyes. His dark brown hair shined in the light almost like a halo. 

“You look pale. You should sit back down.”

Of course he looked pale. He was looking at a ghost.

Sam took the advice, however, letting his weak legs lower himself back down to the porch step. The angel sat down beside him as well, though he allowed for a foot in between himself and the righteous man. 

“We don’t need to make this long. I understand you’ve gone back to your old life, and I would never want to take that from you. I only wanted to see you once more, to see how you’re doing. I wanted to try to make up for what happened the last time we were together.”

The soft tone the angel spoke in seemed so strange. Why wasn’t he angry with Sam? Why wasn’t he trying to smite him or telling him off at the very least for abandoning  
him? How was he even alive and sitting there? Why did he almost look guilty as he spoke?

“You must have a lot of questions, don’t you?”

Sam finally responded with a slight nod.

“Please, ask them. I want to tell you whatever you need to know. I want to—I want to hear your voice again.”

Sam had never seen him look so small before. He held himself up with the same perfect posture as always, but the look deep in his eyes revealed weaknesses the human never saw. Taking a deep breath, he finally managed out a question. “What happened to you when I left?”

Castiel thought for a few moments before constructing an answer. “From what I understand, Lucifer killed me. Before the spell faded, he struck me with my own blade. I don’t know what happened after that, but a few days ago I woke up at the apex of a mountain in the Himalayas—Makalu, I believe. I don’t know what brought me back, but something must have. I don’t want to be hopeful, but. . . The only thing I know of that could ever have the power to bring an angel back to life is God.”

The human tried hard to hold his composure, but at the realization that he had actually gotten Cas killed that composure was starting to slip. “I am so sorry. I can’t believe—I’m so sorry, Cas. I should have stayed, should have found some sort of way to get you out before. . .”

“Sam.” Castiel moved a couple inches closer now, still maintaining some distance while he placed a hand on the human’s shoulder. The hand lined up almost perfectly with the scar underneath his sleeve. “If you had not escaped, neither of us would be here. Lucifer would have tried to dispose of me either way. It’s my fault I let him capture me in the last layer. If you hadn’t listened to Crowley, you would still be in Hell now and the Apocalypse would be starting. You did the right thing, and I’m proud of you for finding your way without my help. You saved the world, Sam.”

“I never wanted you to get hurt, Cas,” Sam murmured, looking down. “I knew you would be trapped in there if I left, and I just—it killed me leaving you back there with that thing in control of your head. You deserved better than that, and I just feel like I let you down.”

The hand on his shoulder shifted to rub Sam’s back as Castiel allowed himself to move closer. “It was never your job to worry about my protection. I was the one protecting you. I was more than willing to give up my life for the greater good, and I was happy to give up my life for you, personally.”

Their eyes locked for several long moments before Cas moved his hand off of Sam, recreating the distance he established before. 

“What do you mean?” asked Sam, moving just an inch closer to Cas. 

“It was my job to take care of you. Heaven designated me to retrieve you, but every time you were in danger, every time I thought I’d lost you or I failed my mission, I worried less and less about letting down Heaven and more about letting you down.” His eyes brows furrowed as he looked away from Sam and toward the overgrown grass in front of them. “The more time I spent with you, the more my mission became about protecting you as opposed to protecting this ‘righteous man’ I’d been assigned to. Does that make sense?”

“Kind of.” Sam bit his lip. “Not really.”

“I care deeply about you, Sam. More so than I’ve ever cared about a human, and more so than I ever should care about a human.” Cas’s eyes looked back to Sam. “It’s shameful, but it’s true. I don’t expect anything in return from you, but you should know this and know that I hold nothing against you for what happened. You did the right thing.”

The words hung in the air around Sam for a couple of confusing moments while he tried to piece it altogether. Castiel, this powerful angel created and possibly resurrected from God Himself, invested in Sam’s wellbeing and even, even something more from how he was speaking. His heart climbed back into his throat as he tried to think of something to say in response, anything to say, but he couldn’t urge himself to speak. Instead, he found himself working on impulse, inching closer towards the angel.

“Sam?” Cas asked in a whisper, noticing how close he was getting. 

The human wrapped his arms tight around Castiel, clinging to him in the strong embrace. It didn’t take long before the other reciprocated, khaki sleeves snaking around Sam’s waist. When finally they each pulled back just a few inches, Cas lingered near the other’s face, staring into his eyes before pressing his pale lips into Sam’s. 

Where the first kiss in the shack had felt tainted and wrong, this new kiss felt pure and careful as Cas’s strong hand cupped Sam’s jaw. Sam was a teen again, having his first kiss filling his chest with flittering butterflies looking for an escape. Whatever this was, it was right, it was so right, and he needed Castiel like he needed water and he needed air. As the kiss grew into something more hungry and passionate, he noticed his hands nearly digging in to the skin on the angel’s vessel, nails grazing at the skin but the other didn’t seem to notice.

This had been the kiss he’d thought of so many times while looking over towards his savior, not that cruel and twisted one that Lucifer had planted on his unsuspecting lips. 

Eventually, Castiel pulled away from the kiss in order to plant another small one on Sam’s forehead. They spent the rest of the afternoon in silence, leaning in to each other and enjoying the company. Having the angel by his side was enough to leave Sam contented.

*

Adjusting to the new pattern of visitation was strange for Castiel. Not that he would ever complain about having the hunter as a part of his new life, but he’d never had any sort of relationship in all the thousands of years he’d existed other than the very formal relationships with his brethren. The regular visits were pleasant, but definitely something to get used to. It was hard figuring out human schedules, as well. Several times he had appeared in whatever motel the Winchesters were staying in, only to nearly get shot by Sam’s surprised brother who was woken up by the sudden intruder. Sam had a conversation with the angel after that about boundaries and scheduling, and he suggested that Castiel acquire one of the human telephones, so that he could call Sam before showing up. It would also make communication easier than just one-sided prayers, Sam added, since the two hunters had begun asking Cas about any and all lore that the angel might be knowledgeable on. Castiel didn’t mind all the questions, though; he was happy to help the two humans. Even after Dean had nearly struck him with a bullet, Castiel had grown fond of Sam’s gruff brother. He reminded Castiel of a vessel he’d had years ago.

It became a difficult balancing act trying to get sufficient alone time with Sam between all the hunts the human went on and all the duties the angel had after his “Heavenly promotion” (that was, at least, what Sam and Dean called it). Sometimes they would only get an hour or two a week in which Cas could transport Sam somewhere secluded and remote where they could just stare up at the stars together or Sam could tell the angel about whatever monster they’d put away. Castiel loved to hear about everything Sam was going through, both the good and the bad. The angel became the only source that Sam confided in with the more difficult things, such as his nightmares and flashbacks. Cas couldn’t heal those wounds, but listening in to the man vent always appeared to help. In return, Castiel would tell Sam stories about what was going on up in Heaven, especially when Sam looked exhausted from recounting his bad memories. 

Today, the two were laying together on a bed in the motel that Sam was staying at. Dean was off helping Bobby with a hunt, and Sam felt too tired from the week’s hunts to go out anywhere special. Castiel didn’t mind, since lazy days like this didn’t come too often for either of them.

The angel sat stripped down to just his white button-up and black slacks, not for any real reason other than that Sam said he looked a little uncomfortable in so many layers. The comment had struck the angel as odd, though he knew Sam well enough to spot some other motive in the statement. He didn’t mind, though. While the physical aspects of their relationship were definitely something he was getting used to, he enjoyed them. Especially now, with Sam resting his head in Cas’s lap. 

“Cas?”

“Yes, Sam?” he asked, running his fingers over the long strands of Sam’s hair.

“I kind of have a weird question, is that okay?”

Castiel let out a soft chuckle. “Yes, that’s okay.”

“I know you’ve never really had this kind of relationship, but I was just wondering if you’d ever, you know, done anything?”

He stared confused. “What do you mean by that?”

Sam sighed. “I mean, have you ever done things with another person? Or, angel I guess. Like, sexual-type things?”

Castiel blinked, registering the question. “Well, I never personally have exactly. I have seen it through memories from my vessels, and I understand all the mechanics of it in most of its forms, but I’ve never participated, I suppose. Most of the time I possessed living vessels, and it never felt right to do with another person there that didn’t get a say in the matter.” His hand moved from Sam’s hair. “Why do you ask?”

A red blush crept over Sam’s cheeks. “No reason.”

Cas curled over to press a quick peck at Sam’s forehead. “I’ve never been opposed to the idea, just never saw myself in a situation where it seemed fit. Never met a human of any gender that I wanted to partake in any sort of physical relationship with. Well, until you, of course.” He cocked his head to the side. “Is that what you’re asking? Did you want to do that?”

Sam sat up, giving a little shrug. “I mean, only if you wanted to. Whenever you might want to.”

Castiel leaned closer towards the man he’d pulled from the pit, stroking over his cheek. “When will your brother return?”

“Not for a couple more hours.” Sam’s eyes widened when he got what Cas was actually asking. “Like, right now? Would you be comfortable with that?”

“Would you?”

Sam looked down, face flushing once more. “I mean, yeah, if you are.”

Castiel could hear how Sam’s pulse quickened as he inched closer. He couldn’t deny that being able to sense every little change in the other excited him in more ways than one. He knew this—everything they were and everything they were doing—was morally wrong and sinful for an angel to partake in, but he didn’t care. Sam was worth any dirty look or any banishment he might receive. Besides, the biggest reason angels were forbidden to sleep with humans was due to the risk of creating Nephilim. Cas was certain no offspring would come from their illicit relationship, so what was the harm?

“Are you sure you’re fine with this idea?” Sam whispered as Castiel snaked his arms around him. “I don’t want you to feel pressured.”

Cas tugged the hunter closer, practically on his lap. “Sam, I am not a creature of many wants. I don’t think I’ve ever desired anything as much as you.”

Sam responded with a hard, hungry kiss that took the angel by surprise for a few moments. Usually their kisses were more gentle and passionate than ravenous, but this new twist excited some sort of beast deep within Castiel. He had never truly known how lust felt until that kiss, now overtaken by the yearning for the man he’d saved from peril so many times. 

This righteous man belonged to him more than he belonged to Hell, just as Castiel was sure somehow he belonged to Sam more than he belonged to Heaven. Perhaps whatever God there be could see it, and that’s why He brought back the angel. Castiel never knew much of soulmates other than how they share space in Heaven, but it seemed possible now that maybe soulmates weren’t a phenomena strictly for human souls. Maybe that tie alone could have brought Cas back to his hunter. It was all flowery speculation, but Castiel enjoyed the thought. 

With greedy tongues exploring each other’s mouths, Castiel dragged Sam down completely on top of him. He tried to recall all that he could from the previous lives of the vessels he’d shared. This needed to be as wonderful as possible for Sam. He wanted to give the human everything.

Castiel held Sam even tighter as he rolled them over so he was on top. “Is this okay?” he asked, pulling back to murmur into the hunter’s ear.

Sam gave a little nod, closing his eyes as Cas sprinkled light kisses along his jawline until their lips met once again. Castiel could practically taste how desperate the other was for him, Sam’s long, needy fingers grabbing at his short hair. That might have hurt him had he been human, but the action was just background noise to the main show of the kiss. Nothing could distract him from the fact that he’d been around for thousands of years since whatever higher power created him and had never been able to taste the sweet lips of his lover. He forgot his empty existence of guilt and shame that had preceded Sam.

Castiel broke the kiss only to hover mere inches away from Sam’s lips while his fingers came to push loose strands of hair out his face. The tips of his fingers traced the side of his cheek before they traversed his neck and chest until they rested at the edge of his gray t-shirt. “Can I . . .?”

Sam gave another nod, and Cas proceeded to grip the seam of the shirt with both hands. A bizarre hint of nervousness clouded his mind, despite the fact that Castiel had seen Sam shirtless many times before since his chest had been bare during most of their traveling through Hell. Somehow, though, taking off that first piece of clothing made the reveal so much different. Sam wasn’t just out for display, he was giving the angel permission to see him. The sentiment was entirely different, and Cas could sense it as the shirt was tossed off to the side. 

In fact, the sight wasn’t entirely the same, either. Right below his left collar bone was a tattoo that had not appeared on his soul in Hell. A black pentagram with an edge that almost looked like rays off of a sun. Cas recognized the mark from some scripture somewhere. His fingers traced over the dark ink.

“An anti-possession sigil? I’ve never seen it embedded in the skin like this before.”

Sam bit his lip. “We used to just wear charms, but too many close calls and then eventually I was possessed. We had to switch to a more permanent option to keep us safe.”

The thought of a demon taking control over Sam made the angel cringe, though staring at the mark he wished there could have been a mark like that to protect his own vessel when they were in Hell. He pressed his lips against the skin right in the center of the star.

Sam tugged on Castiel’s shoulders to pull him back up, confusing his lover for a second before Sam’s callused fingers found their ways to the buttons on the other’s white dress shirt. After Cas gave him an encouraging look, the hunter worked his way down to unbutton and remove the clothing before discarding it to the side where the t-shirt had been thrown. They each took turns removing one and other’s bottoms until they were each stripped down to only their boxers. Pressed up against each other as their lips met once more, Cas could feel Sam growing hard against him, sending a filthy thrill up his spine. 

He hit a road block after a few more minutes of kissing, unsure of where to go from here. The angel tried to recollect all the secondhand memories he had of intercourse, look for ideas of what should come next. In theory, it all was so simple, but in practice, he was too concerned over making things good for his human that he didn’t want to get to the act and just rush through it. There was some sort of English word for this—foreplay. It was critical that he used a lot of that. Experimenting, he ran his hand up and down Sam’s bare chest, tracing an invisible line from his heart to his navel. His hand drifted down lower and lower until it came to the beginning of his red boxers that hugged on to Sam’s hips so tightly. His inexperienced hands dropped lower for a few moments to stroke over Sam through the fabric, eliciting a tiny gasp from the man below. The sound, even being so soft, encouraged Cas to go further and slide his hand down behind the fabric, touching him directly. Sam’s hips lifted up to meet his hand even more, while his hands grasped at Cas’s shoulders. 

Seeing a more than pleased expression on the other’s face as he wrapped his fingers around his length, Cas decided to experiment even more. He focused his grace, pinning Sam’s hands down against the bed over his head with power alone. After acting, he was a little less confident about what he’d done until he saw the dark look that entered the hazel eyes staring up at him. A slight smirk from Sam’s lips assured him that he could continue. 

“You are so beautiful,” whispered Castiel, bringing his hand back up to push those same strands of hair away from his face. He had seen every inch of the world thousands of times over, but none of it could compare to what he saw now, the righteous man splayed out and flushed underneath him.

He pressed one more light kiss to Sam’s forehead before returning his hands down south, tugging the underwear down and leaving the man exposed. Sam shivered as the cool air of the old motel hit him. The man below wiggled his arms a little until Castiel understood and realized him from the invisible force holding his wrists down. Once freed, Sam sat up so that he could reach down and take off Cas’s last article of clothing as well. 

“Can you sit up? I, um, want to do something,” Sam asked, looking unsure.

With a smile, Cas did as he asked, getting off of Sam entirely. The man hesitated for a few moments before speaking. “I haven’t done this kind of thing in a while, so it might not be great, but I wanted to just try it.” Before Castiel could ask what it was that Sam spoke of, he leaned down and wrapped his warm lips around Cas’s tip. 

Even with all he knew about human sex, Castiel had not expected the sensation that came along with that sort of direct contact. He let out a low groan, eyes squeezing shut as Sam took more of him into his mouth. The other’s movements were shy to start, but as he started up a rhythm of bouncing up and down on Cas’s length, he grew more confident and took more of him into his mouth. The head grazed against the back of Sam’s mouth a few times but didn’t go too much further. This was okay; Cas didn’t want to hurt Sam, especially not during their first time together. He ran his fingers through Sam’s shaggy hair, sighing contentedly. 

Sensing that if Sam kept going he may not last as long as he hoped, Cas placed his hands on the man’s cheeks and eased him off. Beaming at his lover, Sam practically pounced on Cas as he kissed him, lips salty with the taste of him. The angel had never seen him look so happy, and he knew this was the right time. 

Castiel pulled his lover off, playfully tossing him down onto the bed below him. He was about to move on top of Sam until realization hit. “Do you, um, have anything?” From all he remembered of this kind of sex, it would hurt too much if they didn’t use some kind of lubrication. 

Sam gestured to the side with his head. “In my tan suit case over there. The first pocket.”

Castiel disappeared for a fraction of a second before reappearing before the suit case on the other side of the room. This startled the human until he spotted his lover in the corner.

“Do you ever just walk?”

Reappearing on top of Sam with the bottle in his hand, Cas shook his head. “My connection with Heaven is clear here. I don’t need to conserve my grace like before.”

Sam rolled his eyes before pressing up to give Castiel another kiss. “You’re so strange.” He laid back down onto the bed, spreading his legs invitingly. 

Popping the cap open, Castiel spread the clear, slippery liquid all over his fingers. “Let me know if any of this is hurting you, okay?” he asked right before inserting his first finger. Cas moved in deeper gradually, watching the man’s face for any sign of distress. 

Sam bit down on his lip but nodded encouragingly. 

After Sam adjusted, Cas worked in another finger as gently as possible, easing them in and out slowly. The long haired man let out a small moan, allowing his head to fall back into the pillow underneath him. Castiel took that as a cue to press one more finger in, and once he appeared sufficiently stretched, he withdrew his fingers and grabbed for the bottle of lubricant, pouring a generous amount into his palm and slicking his cock with the cold substance.

“Are you sure you still want to do this?”

“Yes, yes of course,” Sam insisted, tugging Cas closer to him impatiently.

With a slight chuckle, he lined up his length, taking his time to enter the other man. Under him, he heard Sam suck in a deep breath while he tensed up at the intrusion. Cas wrapped an arm around the mortal, so that he could rub his back soothingly until he was all the way inside of him. 

Being this close with Sam was incredible. He felt like every single inch of his body was lined up with the other, like every cell of his vessel connected with every cell of Sam’s body. He never wanted to be anywhere else than pressed up against this fragile human in this seedy motel. The angel could travel through time if he pleased, but for once in his existence, he wished for the ability to stop time. To repeat these tender moments a million times over. Never did he think this animalistic act could make him feel so very alive, that this mere boy made of tender flesh and breakable bones could have such a tremendous effect on him.

He didn’t begin to pull out until Sam relaxed around him, waiting for a sign of comfort before pressing in and out in shallow, steady bursts. Sam’s arms encircled the angel, holding on to him tightly as he rocked back and forth, taking his time to enjoy each second.

The steady rocking went on for a while, but soon enough, Castiel started to go in deeper and deeper. With one accidental shift of the hips, he came across a tender spot inside the man that made him moan louder than before. Keeping his hips at that angle, he sped up his thrusts and went in as deep as he could into Sam, relishing in the lewd sounds he made. 

One of Sam’s sly hands tried to sneak down to wrap around himself, but the angel used his grace to pull it back. Instead, he let his own hand dive down to stroke Sam in time with the quickening rhythm of his thrusts. 

Whoever was in the room next door, those poor souls, had to hear Sam’s desperate whines as he got closer to the edge. It didn’t take too much more of Cas’s hard movements in time with the strong hand on his length before he went over that edge, coming all over his chest. 

Castiel followed him a few minutes later, the tight clench from Sam climaxing enough to get him close as well. After he finished, he collapsed on top of Sam, not even bothering to pull out for several more seconds as he just enjoyed the afterglow.

He would be punished for this if anyone were to find out, but as he rested on top of Sam, he did not care about his holy duties. Heaven be damned if he was going to leave this bed.

There was a long period of comfortable silence that followed, so long that Cas almost thought that his human had fallen asleep during that time. With his head on his chest, Castiel listened to Sam’s heart beat steady.

“Cas?”

Castiel propped himself up on his elbows. “Yes?”

“I love you, you know.”

He smiled. “I know. I love you, too, Sam.” He left one little peck in the middle of his chest before getting up. They were both filthy from the acts of the afternoon, so a wet towel to clean themselves up would be beneficial. Cas decided to walk this time to the bathroom to retrieve one of the dinky motel towels. He wiped himself down before returning to the bed to do the same for his companion. Once he was finished, he crawled back onto the bed, this time behind Sam so he could lay behind him and embrace him. What was that English term for this again? Something to do with silverware. 

Eventually, Sam did doze off in Cas’s arms. Castiel could not and would never be able to truly sleep, but as he laid there with the other, he began to dream. Dream of the rest of Sam’s short life just like this, sneaking around to be with the human and being able to spend time so close to him. Dream of watching the young man go through a full, hopefully happy life before watching him ascend into the realm above as he should. Dream of the day he could reunite with Sam again in his own personal Heaven. 

It had been so long since Castiel had cared to see what was to come next. So much of his life had been spent on mourning over the past, but now the immortal being had a future.


End file.
